OVPR-Malala

I AM MALALA:
A RESOURCE GUIDE FOR EDUCATORS
For more information about the resource guide,
visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.

A PREFACE FROM MALALA’S FATHER
It is the elder generation’s duty to teach children the universal human
values of truth, fairness, justice and equality. For this purpose, we have
two institutions: families and schools. Education, whether at home
or in the classroom, has the power to promote acceptance of others’
views and to challenge biases and bigotry.
In patriarchal societies, women are expected to be obedient. A
good girl should be quiet, humble and submissive. She is told not to
question her elders, even if she feels that they are wrong or unjust.
As a father, I did not silence Malala’s voice. I encouraged her to ask
questions and to demand answers. As a teacher, I also imparted
these values to the students at my school. I taught my female students to unlearn the lesson of
obedience. I taught the boys to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor.
It is similarly the obligation of schools and universities to instill the principles of love, respect,
dignity and universal humanism in their students. Girls and boys alike must learn to think critically,
to stand up for what they believe is right and build an effective and healthy society. And these
lessons are taught at schools through curriculum. Curricula teach young people how to be
confident individuals and responsible citizens.
I Am Malala is a story about a young girl’s campaign for human rights, especially a woman’s right to
education. The power of this story is that it is true. Truth, justice, forgiveness, and equality—these are
the universal human values, and they are the lessons instilled in Malala’s book. I am, therefore, very
pleased that the Malala Fund and the George Washington University have partnered to develop
this resource guide to accompany I Am Malala.
The resource guide for educators will elevate Malala’s story from a news story to an inspiration for
coming generations. It tells how a country’s power and politics can endanger its own citizens. It tells
how a few people can misinterpret and misuse peaceful religions to distort their true message. It
tells how women and children suffer due to conflicts. And it tells why millions of children are out
of school.
People ask me, what is special about my parenting, which has made Malala so bold and so
courageous and so vocal and so poised I tell them, “Don’t ask me what I did. Ask me what I did not
do.” I did not clip Malala’s wings. Now Malala’s story will be shared in classrooms around the world.
I hope that my daughter’s message will resonate with many future generations of our children and
young people, and that they, too, will feel empowered to raise their voices and spread their wings.
Ziauddin Yousafzai

To expand the reach of Malala’s memoir—I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for
Education and Was Shot by the Taliban—and spread Malala’s message to young people
and activists, the Global Women’s Institute of the George Washington University, in
collaboration with the Malala Fund, developed a resource guide for high school and
college students around the world. Building on the content of Malala’s memoir, the
resource guide supports global efforts to mobilize women and men to address women’s
and girls’ rights to an education.
Malala’s memoir opens the door to some of the greatest challenges of our modern world.
It is about politics, education, culture, religion and violence against women and girls. It
is a moment in the life of a young girl and in the history of a country. To do these broad
themes justice, faculty from a wide range of disciplines contributed to the development
of the resource guide.
The resource guide challenges students to think deeply, share their experiences, and
engage with their communities. Each theme begins with learning objectives and a
narrative, intended to start the conversation and help plan lessons. The theme then
includes individual exercises, group activities, and resources to assist students and
instructors in deepening their knowledge of a topic.
THE EIGHT THEMES ARE:
1. Memoir as Literature and History ......................................................................3
2. Education: A Human Right for Girls ...................................................................7
3. Cultural Politics, Gender and History in
Malala Yousafzai’s I am Malala ....................................................................... 12
4. Religion and Religious Extremism ................................................................. 17
5. Malala and Violence against Women and Girls .............................................. 22
6. Malala Leadership Essay ................................................................................. 27
7. Malala and the Media ..................................................................................... 33
8. Global Feminisms: Speaking and
Acting about Women and Girls ...................................................................... 37

REFLECTIONS FROM A PAKISTANI SCHOLAR
I Am Malala: A Resource Guide for Educators is a unique endeavor to enlighten students and academics,
providing a well-deserved space to the emerging struggle for life, peace, and education around the world. It is
a privilege and honor to have worked with my brother in peace, Ziauddin Yousafzai, as well as the faculty of the
Global Women’s Institute at the George Washington University, to provide my input on a broad range of issues
covered by the resource guide.
Education has the power to transform lives, communities, and societies. I once asked Malala why she had chosen
education as her single-point agenda. Her clear and simple response was that education offers health and hope,
options and opportunities.
Malala’s journey of peace through education and nonviolent resistance is shaping a new discourse from the
United Nations, through refugee camps in Jordan, on to villages in Kenya, and into schools in the Swat Valley,
sharing the message of struggle and hope. This is happening because Malala chose peace and forgiveness over
the violence that has brought prolonged suffering and misery to the lives of those in her own Pashtun community
in Pakistan and Afghanistan and in many countries around the world.
Before 9/11, the idyllic Swat Valley, the land of Malala, was calm. Fruit orchards and vegetable gardens were in
abundance. People were renowned for their folk music and storytelling; schools were in almost every village
and town; and people lived in peace, resolving their disputes nonviolently through Jirga and Sulha. Suddenly
armed militancy appeared on the scene, destroying peace, prosperity, and Pashtunwali, the way of life of Pashtun
people. Traditions faded quickly into the past, as the deadly conflict and trauma of war scarred a generation of
children and of women.
Swat has fresh water, green forests, precious gemstones, and small cottage industries with the potential to export
hydropower, water, fresh and dried fruits, vegetables, and gems. Pashtuns are dreamers, innovative and creative.
Women make fine crafts, and men produce stirring poetry and art. They have the capacity to resolve their
disputes and conflicts creatively through the long-standing institutions of Jirga and Sulha. Once interference in
their social, cultural, and political affairs has ended, Pashtuns will expel extremism from their land.
Malala’s struggle for peace and education against the worst form of violence in the Swat Valley almost cost
Malala her own life. But instead she has become a torchbearer for peaceful and active resistance. Malala provides
continuity for building stable societies, as embodied by those heroes of nonviolence Rumi, Bacha Khan, Gandhi,
Mandela, King, and Mother Teresa. With this shining lineage we are inspired to contribute to a generation of
young people—women and men—who are well-educated in many fields and grounded in the knowledge of
processes that create a peaceful society.
This guide will set a foundation to explore the lives and struggle of Pashtun people and address the root causes
of war in Malala’s land. I am confident that students and academics will create forums, seminars, conferences, and
research centers for dialogue to defeat extremism and bring peace to the people of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
our shared world.
Jahab Zeb
Director of the Global Peace Council Canada
The Centre for Peace Advancement at Conrad Grebel University College,
affiliated with the University of Waterloo, Canada

MEMOIR AS
LITERATURE
AND HISTORY
BY JULIE DONOVAN
P A R T 1
Introduction
In choosing to narrate the brutal attempt on her life, Malala
Yousafzai selected the literary form known as memoir, a
well-established genre used by historical figures and other
thoughtful but less recognized men and women to capture
a certain moment in time. This theme will consider the
particular characteristics of memoir as a literary device and
its effectiveness in communicating Malala’s story through a
discussion of the following topics:
• The unique attributes of memoir as a literary genre
• The difference between autobiographies, memoirs,
and diaries
• Memoir as a powerful witness to history
• The relationship between memoir and memory
Malala Yousafzai’s stirring memoir, I Am Malala: The Girl
Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban,
combines the personal story of a girl’s life caught in the
vortex of war and religious extremism. As an increasingly
popular genre of literary nonfiction, Malala’s memoir
prompts the question: What is it about the memoir that can
make it a more powerful means of expression than other
literary forms In Testament of Youth (1933) Vera Brittain
provides one answer. Grappling with how to depict World
War I from a young woman’s perspective, Brittain rejected
the idea of writing a novel, feeling that it would be too far
removed from the reality of her experience. Opting to write
a memoir enabled Brittain to recount her personal story
against the backdrop of a harrowing war, within a society
that decried female independence and denied her the right
to vote. Here is how she explained her choice: “In no other
fashion, it seemed, could I carry out my endeavor to put the
life of an ordinary individual into its niche in contemporary
history, and thus illustrate the influence of world-wide events
and movements upon the personal destinies of men and
women.” (12)
A memoir can excel in evoking immediacy and veracity,
where private feelings mesh with public issues and raw
emotions intertwine with the detachment of rational
argument and the exegesis of an intellectual or political
stance. Memoir differs from autobiography in that the
memoir concerns a specific, concentrated period within a
life, whereas an autobiography tends to recount the story
of a life that is generally more all-embracing, with a greater
chronological sweep and more linear structure. There are
also points of contiguity between the diary and the memoir,
but the temporal immediacy of the diary typically does not
allow the degree of reflection found in the memoir. All three
forms of relating personal stories are told in the first person,
and therefore readers need to be mindful of the process
of interpreting a narrator’s point of view. When we read a
memoir, we may be less conscious of its aesthetic effect than
we are when we read a poem or a novel. Yet there is an art
to the memoir that exercises rhetorical skill just as much as
other literary forms in terms of pace, tone, and choices in
language.
Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night (1955), and Ishmael
Beah’s account of war in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone:
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) demonstrate how the
memoir stands as a powerful witness to history. Both
of these works convey the visceral effect of personal
experience that gives history a more human context than a
bald recounting of dates, battles, and other details of more
formal or grand historical narratives. They also demonstrate
the occasionally didactic nature of the memoir, which raises
consciousness about society, culture, and government.
Since memory is intrinsic to this genre, we should consider
the complicated relationship between history and memory,
and why some events emerge as more notable than others.
Indeed, the memoir prompts us to consider how memory
and history have an unsettled relationship that is open to
examination.
MEMOIR AS LITERATURE AND HISTORY 3

While the memoir serves as a testament to injustice, it
is also a genre that may indulge the worst excesses of
contemporary voyeurism and self-absorption, so it is worth
considering when memoirs reveal merely narcissism and
even deceit. Though readers concede the subtleties of
framing a story, there remains an expectation that a memoir
must, at its core, be genuine. When it was discovered
that parts of James Frey’s confessional memoir of drug
addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2005), were intentionally
fabricated, many readers felt betrayed. While fiction has its
share of unreliable first-person narrators, what is demanded
of the memoir is reliable narration, since the memoir is
inherently linked to a sense of authenticity and good faith.
Despite Malala’s courage, maturity, and poise, her
experiences happened when she was a child. Malala’s
narrative is typical of the memoir’s ability to give us an
insider’s perspective on events that may seem remote when
reported in newscasts and other media. The vividness of
personal experience evokes not only the sense of terror and
displacement caused by Taliban control but also the beauty
of the Swat Valley and the renowned hospitality of the
Pashtun people. It also serves to educate us about an area
too often conceptualized in the abstract. As Malala explains,
she thinks of herself as primarily Swati, then Pashtun, and
then Pakistani, demonstrating complicated allegiances in
regional and national identity. Malala’s authorial voice is
alternately strident and playful, but we may consider the
challenges involved in successfully sustaining that voice.
Malala’s memoir illustrates the power of contrasts—
from descriptions of bombardment and her assailant’s
shaking hand as he shoots her at close range—to teenage
preoccupations with Twilight books and arguments with
Munneba, her loving but possessive best friend. Although
she campaigns against the encroaching fundamentalism
seeking to destroy girls’ access to education, Malala’s
criticism of the Taliban is combined with an exposition of
other factors that have destabilized her former home: the
repercussions of British colonialism, the Russian invasion of
Afghanistan, support of the West for Afghan mujahideen
and military dictators in Pakistan, and U.S.-ordered drone
strikes. Malala provides the kind of details that only an
eye-witness familiar with her surroundings can give: how
a charismatic Taliban leader sets himself up as a modernday
Robin Hood through his FM radio station, or how
some people prefer sharia law because it is considered
more effective than the corrupt legal system in place.
Piquant details that Malala provides, such as the Pakistani
establishment’s production of a popular soap opera of
its travails called Beyond the Call of Duty, are described
with the impish humor that shines through Malala’s prose,
despite the horrors she experienced. Perhaps it is this
capacity to find laughter amid tears that tempers her
indictment of inequality and cruelty.
WORKS CITED
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013.
Adler, Mortimer. How to Read a Book. New York, NY: Simon and
Schuster, 1972. See Part Three, Chapter 16: “How to Read History,”
in particular the section entitled “How to Read Biography and
Autobiography.”
Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Portland,
OR: Eight Mountain Press, 2002.
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.
Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. London: Penguin, 1994.
Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank. New York: Bantam, 1993.
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Anchor, 2005.
Mandela, Nelson. A Long Walk to Freedom. London: Back Bay, 1995.
Nafasi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York:
Random House, 2008.
Said, Edward. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage, 2000.
Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon,
2007.
Soyinka, Wole. Aké: The Years of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 1981
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead, 2002.
MEMOIR AS LITERATURE AND HISTORY 4

P A R T 2
Individual Activities
1. Writing memoir: Just as the assassination attempt
on Malala profoundly altered the course of her
life, students will write a brief memoir that focuses
on one memorable instance where everything
seemed to change. The event can be personal and
directly related to their family, such as birth, death,
marriage and remarriage; on the other hand, it can
be something of global significance. For many, living
through the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the
Pentagon on September 11, 2011, or the inauguration
of the United States’ first African-American president
in 2008, profoundly marked them. In organizing your
own memoir, reflect on how Malala organized her
narrative by providing the description of a key event,
historic and cultural context, and her own response.
2. Contrasts and complexities in memoir: Explore the
contrasts and complexities revealed by a memoir
of your own choosing. How do the contrasts and
complexities relate to individual experience as it is
affected by social, cultural, and historical events
Do you find that you also have “contrasts” within
yourself as they relate to things in your life that you
feel passionate about or want to change What can
we learn from looking at the world and ourselves in a
more complex way
3. The introduction to memoir states that the memoir
evokes “immediacy and veracity, where private
feelings mesh with public issues, and raw emotions
intertwine with the detachment of rational argument..
Write an essay where you argue for the benefits and
downfalls of approaching a historical or personal
account in this manner. To what extent it is bad or
good to have the personal be mixed with the “facts”
Can you think of a time in your life when the personal
and public became intertwined and how that affected
your thinking or recounting of a situation
4. Select a historical, social, political, or cultural event
and create a blog about it. Consider what it is like to
write a running history based on your own experience.
5. Analyze the following Malala blogs in the light of what
you understand about memoir:
http://malalayousafzaibbcblog.blogspot.com
http://www.malala-yousafzai.com
http://ziauddinyousafzai.blogspot.ca
MEMOIR AS LITERATURE AND HISTORY 5

P A R T 3
Group Activities
1. Identify a historic event chronicled by journalists,
historians, and individuals that has also been
addressed in the form of a memoir, diary, or
autobiography. Divide the class into groups, and ask
each to read different accounts of a same event. For
example, one group can read historical accounts
of the Jews in Holland during War World II whereas
another will read selections from The Diary of Anne
Frank. Another pair might read historical accounts of
apartheid South Africa while others will read Kaffir Boy.
How do they each portray the times The emotional
context Historical facts Where do we feel the greater
affinity
While there are hundreds of wonderful memoirs,
diaries, and autobiographies written in response to
major historical events, we offer these as possible
suggestions:
• The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank) and/or Night
and the Holocaust (Elie Wiesel)
• Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of
Age in Apartheid South Africa (Mark Mathabane)
• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
(Ishmael Beh) and the war in Sierra Leone
• Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi) and the
Iranian Revolution
2. A comparison of Malala and Persepolis by Marjane
Satrapi. Both of these books deal with the plight of
schoolgirls living under a fundamentalist regime.
Students may read an extract of Persepolis or watch
the film in class. Students will then divide into smaller
groups and identify similarities and differences
between Malala and Persepolis. This activity can
show students how Muslim women hail from different
histories, backgrounds, and cultures.
3. Students will be organized into groups to work on the
task of interviewing a person who has lived through a
life event such as the Civil Rights Act, the Apollo moon
landing, or Vietnam War. Develop a memoir based
on your interview and conversations, considering
how the sharing of narratives sheds light on different
perspectives of a historical event.
P A R T 4
Resources
Teachers are encouraged to view the PowerPoint
presentation prepared by Professor Julie Donovan.
https://malala.gwu.edu/sites/malala.gwu.edu/files/Memoir
PPT revised.pdf
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
MEMOIR AS LITERATURE AND HISTORY 6

EDUCATION: A HUMAN
RIGHT FOR GIRLS
BY MICHELE A. CLARK & LARISA WARHOL
P A R T 1
Introduction
On October 9, 2012, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot
in the face on her way home from school. Her offense was
a deeply personal love of learning, accompanied by an
equally passionate belief in the right to an education for
girls in Pakistan and beyond. This theme will consider the
importance of education for girls as a basic human right
through a discussion of the following issues:
• The status of girls’ education in Pakistan
• The international frameworks to ensure education
as a human right for girls
• The importance of education and schooling
• The challenges unique to educating girls
Girls’ Education in Pakistan
“The School that my father dreamed of would have desks
and a library, computers, bright posters on the walls and,
most importantly, washrooms.”
(Malala, Page 41)
After independence, Pakistan inherited a British colonial
school system that has changed little in the past 65 years.
According to the Constitution of Pakistan, the government
is required to provide free and compulsory education for
children ages 5 through 16, although this is not followed in
practice. The educational situation in Pakistan is complex.
There are large disparities between urban and rural areas
as well as social and economic classes and ethnic groups
related to access to school and school resources. Currently
a class-based education system is in place: high-quality
private schools for elites, low-cost private and public schools
for the poor, and madrassa schools for the poorest of the
population. In 2009, primary school attendance for the
entire country was only 66 percent, well below the world
average of 90 percent.
Many schools have large gender disparities. While there is
more gender equity in urban areas, rural areas experience
much gender inequality. In areas like the Swat Valley,
after the Taliban in 2009 enacted a ban on the schooling
of girls, 400 private schools enrolling 40,000 girls were
closed, including the private school run by Malala’s father,
the Khushal School and College in Mingora. However,
even after the Pakistani government regained control over
the region and reopened the schools, many girls did not
return and Taliban insurgents still tried to prevent girls
from being educated. During this period, Malala became
an internationally recognized spokesperson for education,
which resulted in her shooting by the Taliban. Since the
education ban, national and international NGOs have been
working to create more gender balance by opening “nonformal”
schools (Latif, 2011). Malala, her family, civil society
organizations, and the government continue working to
overturn the gender disparities and the social/cultural
norms against schooling women, especially since Islam
urges both men and women to become educated.
Overall, Pakistan suffers from common education challenges
seen in both developing and developed countries: lack of
highly qualified and trained teachers, outdated curricula,
and a lack of education resources and materials (Ahmad et
al., 2013). There are also challenges related to establishing
the role of religion in school curricula and determining the
language of instruction. Urdu is the language that different
peoples and provinces in Pakistan use to communicate
with one another, whereas English is the official language
of the state and the language of higher education. At the
same time, education research promotes the use of local
languages for cultural continuity and the cognitive benefits
of multilingualism.
EDUCATION: A HUMAN RIGHT FOR GIRLS 7

The efforts of Malala, her family, and the previous PPP and
ANP coalition government have brought some positive
changes to education in Pakistan (e.g., more tolerance and
protection of human rights and the inclusion of more secular
nationalist leaders, movements, and historical figures). In
addition, after Malala’s shooting, a U.N. petition prompted
the ratification by the Pakistani National Assembly of the
Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill of 2012, which
upholds the constitutional mandate of education for all and
authorizes fines for negligent schools and parents. Malala’s
story has brought worldwide attention to the ongoing
challenges and to the changes that need to take place to
improve education in Pakistan, especially for girls.
Education as a Human Right for Girls
“As we crossed the Malakand Pass, I saw a young girl
selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a piece of
paper with a pencil she had to account for the oranges she
had sold, as she could not read or write. I took a photo of
her and vowed I would do everything in my power to
help educate girls just like her. This was the war I was
going to fight.”
(Page 217)
Malala’s commitment to education for girls is grounded in
modern international human rights discourse. According
to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), education is considered a
“fundamental human right” and “essential for the exercise
of all other rights.” The international community first
recognized this in 1948 through Article 26 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, stating, “Everyone has a
right to education.” The article affirms the right to free and
compulsory education in elementary school and the general
availability of technical, professional, and higher education.
Building on the universal declaration, numerous conventions
have affirmed the rights of children to “free, universal, and
compulsory education” with specific references to the rights
of girls. Notably, the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) calls
upon states to “take all appropriate measures to eliminate
discrimination against women in order to ensure them equal
rights with men in the field of education.”
The third Millennium Development Goal seeks to “promote
gender equality and empower women,” but we are far from
seeing success. One hundred twenty-three million young
people worldwide still lack basic reading and writing skills,
and girls comprise 61 percent of that number. While girls
are gaining access to primary education, gender disparities
remain high precisely where education is able to help shape
a young person’s future—at secondary and higher levels of
education. On her 16th birthday, July 12, 2013, in a speech
before the U.N. General Assembly, Malala reminded the
international community of its commitment to defend the
rights of education for girls and women by saying, “Today
is the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who
raised their voice for their rights.”
Purposes of Education and Schooling
“They can stop us going to school, but they can’t stop
us learning.”
(Page 161)
Education is an integral and necessary part of any
society. In modern times, it is most often associated
with schools and the information learned in schools.
As globalization encourages nations to form modern
capitalistic societies, much of what children need to know
to actively participate in these types of societies is taught
in schools. In postcolonial countries where there is often
linguistic and cultural diversity, schooling has also become
an important tool to build national unity and promote
citizenship through a national curriculum, such as the one
developed in Pakistan in 2006. Thus, education and schools
impart not only specific and relevant content knowledge
needed for economic advancement but also integral social
knowledge needed for a cohesive society. This curriculum
discarded rote learning for a greater focus on analytical
thinking and marked a modest shift toward removing
materials that glorified war and incited conflict, ensuring
greater gender balance, and including references to local
culture in textbooks. Critics of the revisions, however,
believe that it did not go far enough and that it still projects
a biased interpretation of Pakistani culture. (Education
Reform in Pakistan)
Within global efforts for development, schooling is
considered a foundational element for economic
development and nation building. Education has become
a common world agenda item, as seen in the “Education
for All” (EFA) movement, which has focused on ascertaining
demographic trends and examining the overall benefits of,
and constraints to, education in the developing world. EFA,
led by UNESCO, releases an annual monitoring report and
has also developed the Global Partnership for Education,
which helps low-income countries achieve free and
universal primary education. EFA directly relates to MDGs
that emphasize that education is a human right, and it has a
positive impact on the economic development of the local
and national communities. EFA also endorses increased
female empowerment and gender equity. This consensus is
solidified by the United Nations’ unprecedented emphasis
on girls’ and women’s empowerment and human capital
investment as the condition of development in the eight
Millennium Development Goals.
EDUCATION: A HUMAN RIGHT FOR GIRLS 8

The Challenges of Educating Girls
“I believe that female teachers should educate girls … but
first, we need to educate our girls so that they can become
teachers!”
(Page 118)
Traditional studies promoting education for girls focus
on the positive impact of education for their future wellbeing.
In particular, benefits include higher wages, greater
participation in public/political life, later marriages, and
fewer, healthier, and better-educated children. These
benefits, however, are offset by a broad spectrum of
challenges, which need to be addressed by policymakers,
donors, and local activists. Many obstacles are rooted
in culture and tradition and keep girls in a worldview
where education plays no part in their futures. While still
in elementary school, Tor Pekai, Malala’s mother, stopped
going to classes because, simply put, she did not see the
value to an education. “There seemed no point in going to
school to just end up cooking, cleaning, and bringing up
children, so one day, Pekai sold her books for nine annas,
spent the money on boiled sweets and never went back. Her
father said nothing.” (Page 40)
Religious tenets in many parts of the world further define a
woman’s place as caring for her husband and children and
not interacting with men outside of her immediate family,
factors which limit a woman’s professional opportunities.
The lack of female teachers creates an obstacle to educating
girls where fears of sexual harassment as well as social
taboos in mixing the sexes constrain girls’ attendance. And
finally, a family’s economic status will determine whether
resources will be invested in educating sons or daughters.
Malala illustrates this boy preference when she describes
how school “wasn’t the only thing my aunts missed out on.
In the morning, when my father was given cream or milk, his
sisters were given tea with no milk. If there were eggs, they
would be only for the boys. When a chicken was slaughtered
for dinner, the girls would get the wings and the neck while
the luscious breast meat was enjoyed by my father and my
grandfather.” (Page 29)
Evidence is now emerging to indicate that not only girls
benefit from getting an education. According to a 2011
World Bank study, Measuring the Economic Gain of
Investing in Girls, “Improving the socio-economic outcomes
for girls and young women is of central importance, not
only to the beneficiaries themselves but also to their
communities and the next generation.” This conclusion is at
the heart of Malala’s message and creates a challenge for all
of us as academics, activists, and global citizens.
P A R T 2
Individual Activities
A. The role of incentives in encouraging
school attendance.
Malala’s mother stopped going to school because she
did not see the relevance of an education for her own
future. Her parents did not challenge her decision, and
the community offered no incentive to educate girls either
through opportunities for employment or increased social
status. However, research now indicates that raising a
family’s income will increase a boy’s chance for staying
in school by 16 percent, and 41 percent for girls. Many
educational initiatives now offer financial compensation to
parents to keep their daughters in school. Write a two-page
paper arguing for the value of such incentives as a longterm
strategy to keep girls in school. Are there environments
where financial incentives work better than others
B. What would Malala say
Millennium Development Goal 3 focuses on promoting
gender equality and empowering women. A target of
this goal is to “eliminate gender disparity in primary and
secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels
of education no later than 2015.” (http://www.un.org/
millenniumgoals)
Write Malala’s next speech to the U.N. General Assembly
in the fall of 2015, in which she addresses the status of
MDG 3. What recommendations will she make to the U.N.
bodies in order to ensure that the aims of the goals will be
accomplished Draw on Malala’s efforts and activities as
illustrated in her book. Limit: 1,000 words.
EDUCATION: A HUMAN RIGHT FOR GIRLS 9

P A R T 3
Group Activities
C. Debate: Is education a human right
Malala appeared in front of the United Nations and paid
homage to all girls, boys, and women who claimed their
right to an education. Primary schooling is specifically cited
as a right in international conventions, and states are also
encouraged to provide for secondary and higher education.
But does educating children beyond primary school carry
with it the same duties and obligations as other rights
Using Malala’s experience as a starting point, divide the
class into two groups and debate the question, Should
states be held accountable for education of their children
and youth
D. Gender analysis on education in
Pakistan group project
In small groups of three or four people, you will be
conducting a gender analysis of education in Pakistan. Using
Malala’s memoir as a primary source, you will write a twopage
policy brief including recommendations to inform a
donor-funded program to support gender-based education
development projects in Pakistan.
Your brief should cover USAID’s Six Domains of Gender
Analysis (see right column), and your recommendations
should address the following questions:
• What are key gender issues that might affect the ability
of a project to achieve its goals or prevent women and
men from benefiting equally
• Does the gender analysis suggest that without any
proactive intervention there will be gender imbalance
in projects
• What types of data should be collected to track the
gender-related project impacts
• What might be some potential unintended
consequences
Your gender analysis should use as your primary source
Malala’s memoir.
It should also include an investigation of secondary
sources related to Pakistan’s laws, policies, and institutional,
social, and religious practices and/or other research reports
and literature.
USAID’S SIX DOMAINS OF GENDER ANALYSIS
Source: USAID Tips for Conducting a
Gender Analysis at the Activity or Project Level
http://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1865/201sae.pdf
Access
This domain refers to a person’s ability to use the necessary
resources to be a fully active and productive participant
(socially, economically, and politically) in society. It includes
access to resources, income, services, employment,
information, and benefits.
Knowledge, Belief, and Perceptions
This domain refers to the types of knowledge that men and
women possess, the beliefs that shape gender identities and
behavior, and the different perceptions that guide people’s
understanding of their lives, depending upon their gender
identity.
Practices and Participation
This domain refers to people’s behaviors and actions in life—
what they actually do—and how this varies by gender roles
and responsibilities. The questions cover not only current
patterns of action but also the ways in which men and
women may engage differently in development activities.
Types of action include attendance at meetings and training
courses, and accepting or seeking out services. Participation
can be both active and passive.
Time and Space
This domain recognizes gender differences in the availability
and allocation of time and the locations in which time is
spent. It considers the division of both productive and
reproductive labor; the identification of how time is spent
during the day (week, month, or year, and in different
seasons); and how men and women each contribute to the
welfare of the family, community, and society. The objective
of this domain is to determine how men and women spend
their time and what implications their time commitments
have on their availability for program activities.
Legal Rights and Status
This domain involves assessing how people are regarded
and treated by customary legal codes, formal legal
codes, and judicial systems. The domain encompasses
legal documentation such as identification cards, voter
registration, and property titles.
Additionally, the domain includes the right to
inheritance, employment, atonement of wrongs, and
legal representation.
EDUCATION: A HUMAN RIGHT FOR GIRLS 10

Power and Decision Making
This domain pertains to the ability of people to decide,
influence, control, and enforce personal and governmental
power. It refers to one’s capacity to make decisions freely
and to exercise power over one’s body, within a household,
community, municipality, and state. This domain also details
the capacity of adults to make household and individual
economic decisions, including the use of household and
individual economic resources, income, and their choice
of employment. Additionally, this domain describes the
decision to vote, run for office, enter into legal contracts, etc.
P A R T 4
Resources
Articles and Reports
Ahmad, I., Rauf, M., Rashid, A., Rehman, S. & Salam, M.
(2013). Analysis of the Problems of Primary Education
System in Pakistan: Critical Review of the Literature.
Academic Research International, 4 (2), 324-331.
Bengali, K. (1999). History of Educational Policy Making and
Planning in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy
Institute: Working Paper Series #40.
International Conventions Related to Education
• The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
• The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
• The Millennium Development Goals
Chaaban, J. & Cunningham, W. 2011. Measuring the
Economic Gain of Investing in Girls: The Girl Effect Dividend.
Policy Research Working Paper 5753. Washington, D.C.: The
World Bank.
Hameed-ur-Rehman, M. & Moosa Sadruddin Sewani,
S. (2011) Critical Analysis of the Educational Policies of
Pakistan. The Dialogue, VIII, 3.
Lafit, A. (2011). Alarming Situation of Education in Pakistan.
UNESCO: Press International Report.
Levine, R. et al. (2008). Girls Count: A Global Investment
& Action Agenda. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global
Development.
Malhotra, A. et al. 2003. Impact of Investments in Female
Education on Gender Equality. Washington, D.C.:
International Center for Research on Women.
Education Reform in Pakistan, Asia Report No. 257,
June 2014, International Crisis Group, Belgium available
at http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/
pakistan/257-education-reform-in-pakistan.pdf
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
EDUCATION: A HUMAN RIGHT FOR GIRLS 11

CULTURAL POLITICS,
GENDER, AND HISTORY
IN MALALA YOUSAFZAI’S
I AM MALALA
BY KAVITA DAIYA
P A R T 1
Introduction
In order to appreciate the cultural issues around female
experiences brought forward by Malala Yousafzai’s memoir,
I Am Malala, it is important to situate the memoir historically
and read it as a part of a particular cultural and political
context in Pakistan. In this essay, I will connect culture and
history through the following:
• A discussion of how Malala Yousafzai’s narrative
illuminates common cultural practices around the
place of girls in the family in modern South Asia
• An examination of the connections between cultural
practices shaping girls’ experiences and the history of
secularism in Pakistan
Culture and History
From a Euro-American vantage point, it may be tempting
to approach Malala’s memoir as evidence of the
incompleteness of Pakistan’s modernity or of how “women
in the Global South” are victims of their own cultures and
traditions. In such approaches, readers tend to reductively
homogenize whole communities and cultures, erasing
the complex diversity in them to produce one simplistic
idea about a place; examples would include “exotic India,”
“underdeveloped Africa,” or “repressive China.” Historically,
many Western feminists have participated in producing
stereotypical and ahistorical images of women from the
so-called third world as simplistic victims of their “cultures.”
Many recent feminist critics like Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and bell hooks have criticized
these accounts, which not only stereotype and dehistoricize
cultures but also ignore how girls and women in non-
European contexts criticize, negotiate, and challenge the
violence and discrimination they face. Malala’s memoir
should be read as part of this tradition of critique and
dissent if we do not want to reduce her to this stereotype
of third world woman/victim. As Malala also insists, “I don’t
want to be thought of as the ‘girl who was shot by the
Taliban’ but the ‘girl who fought for education. ’ ” (152-153)
If we want to understand Malala, as she herself wishes, as
an active, resistant, and political actor in her Pakistani and
Muslim community, then we have to attend to the history of
Pakistan and secularism, which profoundly shapes her as a
political subject.
Pakistan is a relatively young nation: It was formed in
August 1947 when the British decolonized the Indian
subcontinent. At the same time that the British granted
India independence, they also divided it and created two
countries, Pakistan and India. Having stoked fears on the
part of Muslims that they would be oppressed in a free India,
as they were outnumbered by Hindus, the British enacted
a partition along religious lines. Many Muslim-majority
regions formed “Pakistan,” and Hindu-majority areas were
named “India.” Pakistan became independent on Aug. 14,
1947, and India on Aug. 15, 1947. Thus, from the start, the
popular understanding was that Pakistan was created “for
Muslims,” so that they would not be a minority in what was a
Hindu-majority India. Following this partition, approximately
7 million Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan; called
mohajirs, or migrants, they faced discrimination as outsiders.
As a result, they eventually mobilized themselves and
became a political force: the Muttahida Quami Movement
(MQM). Malala also refers to the mohajirs and their political
clout: “The MQM is a very organised movement and the
mohajir community sticks together.” (111) In part, the
large scale of Partition migrations was a consequence of
religious violence; when the locations of the borders were
announced by radio on Aug. 16, Hindus and Sikhs attacked
Muslims and vice versa. Approximately 2 million people
died in the span of one year, while by official counts, 5
CULTURAL POLITICS, GENDER, AND HISTORY IN MALALA YOUSAFZAI’S I AM MALALA 12

million Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan for India, and 7 million
Muslims left India for Pakistan. In this, as in other moments
of ethnic conflict, women became targets of terrible sexual
violence, mutilation, abduction, and commodification. The
experience and enduring impact of this gendered ethnic
violence have been the focus of much research, including
my first book, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and
National Culture in Postcolonial India ([2008] 2013).
Subsequently, as feminist historians Ritu Menon and Kamala
Bhasin detail, from 1948 till 1956, both India and Pakistan
agreed to forcibly repatriate and “exchange” the over
100,000 women who had been abducted, regardless of the
women’s own wishes. They were also forced to leave behind
any children they had after their abduction. Enacted at the
scale of the nation-state, this dehumanizing action formally
cast women as property that “belonged” to both the ethnic
community they were born in and the nation. This idea that
women are not equal citizens but rather that they “belong”
to the nation and community—also operative in other conflict
zones from Bosnia to Rwanda—has continued to shape
women’s experiences during conflict.
Secularism and Gender
Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, had originally
intended for Pakistan to be a Muslim country but a
constitutionally secular state in which all communities—
Hindu, Christian, Parsi, Sikh, Muslim—lived peacefully, and
women and men had equal rights (21, 49). However, he
passed away shortly after independence, and since then,
the Pakistani government has had a checkered relationship
with institutions of secularism. In Chapter 20, Malala refers
to this history when she describes her trip to Jinnah’s
tomb in Karachi. She asserts how Jinnah had dreamed
of a secular and inclusive Pakistan when he had founded
the country. After 1947, ethnic minorities including many
Hindus, Parsis, Jews, and Sikhs left the country, fleeing
religious persecution. After Jinnah, successive political
leaders colluded with the Army and religious groups as they
jockeyed for political power. As political power shifted back
and forth from democratic forces to the military in different
decades, the period from 1977 to 1988 under the military
dictator Zia ul Haq saw a mass movement sweeping the
countryside and the cities of Pakistan that argued for the
radical Islamization of both state and civil society. While
religious parties were able to consolidate popular support
from a largely uneducated and unemployed youth, as
there was little industry in the fledgling nation to support
the growth of a middle class, the Harvard- and Oxfordeducated
political elite often made compromises with the
Army and the religious parties to preserve their power.
Malala observes in her memoir that General Zia argued that
the Army’s government was “pursuing Islamic principles”
and opened many religious schools across the country.
He ushered in much repression, from setting up “prayer
committees in every district” and “prayer inspectors” to
changing laws so that a woman’s word in court counted for
“only half that of a man’s.” (21)
The film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters, 2003) by notable
Pakistani independent filmmaker Sabiha Sumar captures this
transformation poignantly, tracing how it affects the life of
a female Partition survivor in rural Pakistan. The film depicts
the experience of rape and sexual violence that women
experienced during the 1947 Partition, and connects it with
how women again became increasingly erased from public
life and stripped of equal rights with General Zia’s 1979
Islamization of Pakistan. Khamosh Pani won critical acclaim at
film festivals globally.
Alongside this, any understanding of Pakistan must
consider how it was and continues to be affected by the
political history of its neighbor Afghanistan; indeed, the
rise to power of the Taliban in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
region, formerly known as North West Frontier Province,
where Malala is from, is not unrelated to the rise of the
Taliban in Afghanistan during the Cold War. From 1979
to 1988, the United States covertly funded, trained, and
armed mujahideen militants through Pakistan, creating
what became the Taliban to resist the Russian occupation
of Afghanistan. Malala is keenly aware of and criticizes
both Zia’s Islamization and the American involvement in
Cold War Taliban politics and support of Pakistan’s military
rulers. As Malala also mentions, in 1979, once Russia
invaded Afghanistan and the U.S.-supported shah of Iran
was overthrown, the U.S. lost its regional base in Iran and
so shifted to Pakistan: “Billions of dollars flowed into our
exchequer from the United States … and weapons to help
the ISI [Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency] train the
Afghans to fight the [Russian] communist Red Army. General
Zia was invited to meet President Ronald Reagan at the
White House … The US government lavished praise on
him.” (22)
Girls and Male Privilege
If we approach culture as a historically changing set of
learned and shared ideas and practices, then we can
understand better how the cultural privileging of boys
manifests itself in different ways across the world. Malala’s
memoir shows how poor families in Pakistan and many
other parts of South Asia endeavor to ensure that the boys
get some kind of education and often care less if their
daughter remains illiterate, because she does not need
to be educated to assume the expected role of wife and
mother. In an early moment in her narrative, describing the
birth of her younger brother, Malala recalls, “My mother
had been waiting for a son and could not hide her joy
when he was born. To me he seemed very thin and small,
like a reed that could snap in the wind, but he was the
apple of her eye, her ladla. It seemed to me that his every
wish was her command.” (16) This moment where Malala
CULTURAL POLITICS, GENDER, AND HISTORY IN MALALA YOUSAFZAI’S I AM MALALA 13

ecognizes the inequality between her and her brother’s
treatment signals how, from the moment they are born, male
children are prized and privileged over female children in
a large majority of families in South Asia. This has terrible
implications for girl children. The powerful documentary It’s
a Girl (2012) shows that female infanticide has generated
a massive gap in the population ratio of men to women
across a large part of Asia, where, according to the United
Nations, an estimated 200 million women are missing due
to gendercide. The social organization of South Asia’s many
communities is largely patriarchal. Many believe that the
son will eventually care for the parents when they are old,
providing a safety net for the future in a society without any
state-sponsored social security. The son therefore is to be
prized; the daughter, however, will marry and leave for her
husband’s family. She is thus often seen as an economic
burden, even as she performs unrecognized but valuable
labor in the fields and the home for her family.
These patriarchal ideas that the son is superior to the
daughter prevail in middle-class and wealthy families
as well. It is not uncommon therefore to see, as Malala
describes, the husband and son in the family getting
the choice meats at dinnertime, or more food, more
milk or eggs, which is expensive, while the daughter-inlaw
or daughter gets less or none (21-22). This kind of
discrimination is both subtle and deeply unfair, as it inhabits
the intimate relations of a family and indelibly will shape
the sense of self-worth as well as physical health of the girls
and women in the family. Malala is able to cast a critical
lens on this, because her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who is
educated, liberated, and fair-minded, rejects this genderbased
way of treating girls as less, and she embraces his
perspective. Because of his education and support, she is
able to challenge gender inequality within her culture. But
many others are not so fortunate. In 2009, I investigated the
tragic and untimely death of my 34-year-old cousin Kavita,
married into a very rich family in Mumbai, India. I learned
that in the four years of her marriage, she had been tortured
and abused in various ways, including the deprivation of
food. Sometimes the house servant would sneak a sandwich
into her room out of pity; sometimes she got food through
her sister. This family hid bars of gold in their wardrobes
and bank lockers, and yet withheld nutritious food from my
cousin. This is not an isolated story: Most girls learn early
that they can expect to get less food than boys.
Cultural Politics and Women’s Struggles
“We talked about how things happen for different reasons,
this happened to me, and how education for females
not just males is one of our Islamic rights. I was speaking
up for my right as a Muslim woman to be able to go to
school.” (141)
This is a poignant moment, underscoring how at the heart
of Malala’s story is a vulnerable girl child wanting only to go
to school to learn things about her own life and the world.
It is also a powerful moment in which Malala is showing
us a complex vision of Pakistani culture: one that allows
debate and dissent on what actually IS Pakistani and Islamic
culture. That secularism is a problematic and contested idea
in Pakistan is apparent even in Malala’s text. She discovers
that the Taliban have named her as a target only when she
happens to meet the Pakistani-American journalist Shehla
Anjum on a visit to Karachi, and Anjum mentions this to her:
“We didn’t know what she was talking about so she went
on the Internet and showed us that the Taliban had that day
issued threats against two women—Shad Begum, an activist
in Dir, and me, Malala. ‘These two are spreading secularism
and should be killed,’ it said.” (112) In response to the
Taliban’s claim that education is un-Islamic and “Western,”
Malala asserts: “Today we all know education is our basic
right. Not just in the West; Islam too has given us this right.
Islam says every girl and every boy should go to school. In
the Quran it is written, God wants us to have knowledge. ”
(263) Similarly, later in the narrative, she argues, “I love my
God. I thank my Allah. I talk to him all day. He is the greatest.
By giving me this height to reach people, he has also given
me great responsibilities. Peace in every home, every street,
every village, every country—this is my dream. Education for
every boy and every girl in the world. To sit down on a chair
and read my books with all my friends at school is my
right.” (265)
The Taliban’s view of culture, and of women’s role as silent
property, is thus being challenged by Malala, civil society,
and now the government. Toward the end of her memoir,
Malala notes how many girls’ schools and colleges in
Pakistani cities had been attacked and bombed since she
left for England. It is very clear that even when segregated in
all-girls schools and colleges, where thousands of Pakistani
parents are sending their girls to get an education that they
hope might lead them to a better life, female education
is not acceptable to the Taliban. What is at stake then is
both the autonomy and rights of local Pakistanis, as well
as the very place and personhood of the girl child—within
the family and home, and outside in public life and in the
institutions of civil society, like schools.
CULTURAL POLITICS, GENDER, AND HISTORY IN MALALA YOUSAFZAI’S I AM MALALA 14

P A R T 2
Individual Activities
1. Investigate the difference between urban and
rural women’s schools and colleges in Pakistan.
How many exist in the major cities like Karachi
and Lahore, and how many in rural areas What
challenges do they face
2. Identify and discuss the textual moments where
Malala sets out her political opinions about women,
secularism, and culture. What can we glean from
this dialogue about how she views modern Islamic
identity
3. A new Pakistani animated series about a female
superhero, Burka Avenger, also advocates for the
value of education as Malala does. Identify and
view an episode from this series, and explain how it
resonates with or differs from Malala’s memoir.
P A R T 3
Group Activities
1. Watch Sabiha Sumar’s film Silent Waters. Discuss how
women’s lives are depicted in the film. What factors
have a negative impact on the different women’s lives,
in the public sphere and in their private lives, across
the generations
2. Watch the documentary It’s a Girl, and identify the
various factors that generate gendercide according to
the film. Then discuss strategies the film identifies that
can combat and end gendercide, and how they can be
implemented. Discuss how the documentary connects
with the memoir: What are the points of congruence
and divergence
3. Study three different feminist activists or women’s
organizations in Pakistan (some listed below). Identify
the focal issue for the activists or organizations—be it
education, human rights, rape laws, domestic violence,
rural development, etc.—and the method by which
they articulate their resistance and projects. Together,
discuss the outcome of each one’s struggle, and map
out their similarities and differences, their strengths
and limitations.
CULTURAL POLITICS, GENDER, AND HISTORY IN MALALA YOUSAFZAI’S I AM MALALA 15

P A R T 4
Resources
Pakistani writing on women:
Nadeem Aslam’s poignant novel Maps for Lost Lovers takes
up the issue of violence against women in Pakistani culture
through the representation of love and marriage. We can
thus place Malala’s memoir in its larger literary context
of Pakistani, and more broadly South Asian, literature by
reading it alongside works like Aslam’s novel, Bapsi Sidhwa’s
novels The Bride and Cracking India, Talat Abbasi’s short
stories in Bitter Gourd and Other Short Stories, Kamila
Shamsie’s novel Salt and Saffron, Sara Suleri’s memoir
Meatless Days, and others.
Historical and cultural works:
Women’s organizations:
• The Sarhad Rural Support Program
• Women Media Center
• Aurat Foundation
• All Pakistan Women’s Association
• Blue Veins
• Sindhiani Tahreek
• Society for Appraisal and Women
Empowerment in Rural Areas
• The Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan
Irfan Husain, Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam, and the West
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition
and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees,
Boundaries, Histories
Ayesha Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience: Women
and the State of Pakistan,” in Women, Islam and the State,
edited by Deniz Kandiyoti
Prominent activists:
• Munawar Khan
• Muneeza Shamsie
• Asma Jahangir
• Mukhtar Mai
• Tehmina Durrani
• Samar Minallah
• Shad Begum
• Malalai Joya
• Sakena Yacoobi
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
CULTURAL POLITICS, GENDER, AND HISTORY IN MALALA YOUSAFZAI’S I AM MALALA 16

RELIGION AND
RELIGIOUS
EXTREMISM
BY KELLY PEMBERTON
P A R T 1
Introduction
Islam in Its Religious and Cultural Manifestations
Characterized alternately as a religion of peace,
ecumenism, and gender egalitarianism, or as a faith
predisposed to intolerance, extremism, and misogyny,
Islam is arguably the most misunderstood religion of the
21st century. Discussions of Islam are rarely informed by a
grounded understanding of its foundations or of its varied
manifestations in different cultural, political, and religious
contexts. While Islam is often cited in the mass media as
the cause of the oppression of women in Muslim-majority
nations, it is much less explored as a force for progressive
change in the world. Yet when examined critically, both in
its foundational context and in light of major developments
taking place among religiously observant Muslims today, it
is clear that Islam can, and does, operate as such a force. The
theme “Religion and Religious Extremism” addresses the
challenges of assessing Islam in its religious, sociocultural,
and political manifestations. By religion we mean the
faith-based beliefs and practices that Muslims observe. By
sociocultural we mean the variety of social relationships
and customary practices that are associated with Muslim
communities. These practices are controversial among
Muslims because some, such as pilgrimage to the tombs of
deceased holy men and women other than the tomb of the
Prophet Muhammad,
1
festive celebrations of the Prophet
Muhammad’s birthday (milad), or hiring a female dancer to
perform at a wedding, are considered to be outside the pale
of Islamic faith and within the realm of extra-Islamic regional
or local cultural observations.
Operating from the assumption that it is impossible to speak
of a single, monolithic Islam, yet that there is something
about Islam as a religion (belief, practice) and culture
(moral guide, way of living) that has the power to unite the
majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims as a community of
believers, we will discuss
• the problematics of defining Islam
• the varied forms that Islam takes in different social
and cultural contexts,
• the question of extremism in Islam
• how Muslim girls and women (and the men who
support them) have been transforming Islam into a
force for progressive change in the world today
These themes are all evident in Malala Yousafzai’s memoir,
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was
Shot by the Taliban. Through Malala’s story we learn about
the ways in which Islam is expressed, lived, interpreted, and
manipulated.
1
The salawat, “salah allahu alaihi wa sallam,” is a phrase that Muslims use to pronounce blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad. Sometimes the
phrase is abbreviated as SAW or PBUH for “peace be upon him,” but these abbreviations are controversial and, to some, suggest a lack of respect.
With this in mind, we have used the full salawat in Arabic, as a superscript, in line with contemporary literary conventions seen in texts about Islam.
RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM 17

The Challenges of Defining Islam as
it Relates to Gender
Many of the problematics of defining Islam’s views on
gender stem from some of the foundational teachings in
the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s sunna (teaching
and practice), including the rights and obligations of
women and girls, and male-female relationships. For
example, women have the right to attach conditions to
their marriage contract, such as the right to continue
pursuing their education after marriage. As wives, women
are obliged to care for and show respect to their husbands.
This is a mutual obligation: The husband, who is required
to spend his income to take care of his family (while his
wife is not obliged to spend her income on the family),
is commanded in the Qur’an to respect his wife and to
treat her with kindness and love. While it is commonly
assumed that there is a readily identifiable core of Islam,
the evidence in these two sources suggests that there
were multiple understandings of orthopraxy (correct
practice) and “authentic” beliefs even among the first few
generations of Muslims. Malala’s story illustrates some of
these problematics. For example, her father’s commitment
to the education of girls, a passion shared by his young
daughter, is atypical of men and women in his Pashtun
community yet wholly in conformity with the foundational
teachings of the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet.
These teachings emphasize that knowledge is to be sought
after by both men and women, boys and girls. The history
of Islam, from its earliest origins, is filled with examples of
Muslim girls and women who were renowned as scholars,
including and especially the Prophet’s young wife Aishah,
who transmitted a large number of hadith (reports) about
the Prophet Muhammad. These hadith, which are also
considered part of the sunna of the Prophet, are one of the
two most important textual sources of the faith for Muslims,
second only to the Qur’an. As a famous hadith of Prophet
Muhammad says, Muslims should “seek knowledge even
as far as China.”
The Varied Forms of Islam
The early forms of Islam reflect multiple understandings and
beliefs among Muslims. These include 1) the split between
Sunni and Shia Muslims, which began in the late seventh
century, 2) the appearance of alternative communities
(such as the Qarmatians and the mystics of Islam, or the
Sufis), and 3) the impact of pre-Islamic (and non-Muslim)
cultures on the development of Islam and Islamic texts and
institutions. An evaluation of these divisions will serve as a
departure point for understanding how cultural and social
contexts as well as key historical and political developments
over time have shaped the multiple forms that Islam has
taken around the world. It is commonplace to hear that the
forms of Islam practiced by Muslims in countries like Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria
look very different from each other. Likewise, the forms of
Islam practiced by communities within these countries can
look very different, too. For example, celebrations of major
Islamic holidays are often combined with observances
of locally significant commemorative events, and the
significance of ethnic identity distinguishes Pashtun Muslims
like Malala and her family from other Muslims in South
Asia and the rest of the world. Still, there are key elements
that unite Muslims across these countries and cultural
contexts. Some of the elements include the reverence that
is accorded the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad,
and the ideal of Islamic sharia as a moral guiding force for
Muslims (the latter differs from Islamic sharia as applied to
the law, or fiqh). Malala’s story illustrates how sectarian and
ethnic divisions can trump adherence to the foundational
teachings of Islam, yet it also demonstrates how Pashtuns
participate in a community of shared identities with other
Muslims globally. For instance, Malala’s struggle is a
continuation of the nonviolence philosophy of Bacha Khan
(Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan), a prominent Pashtun activist who
struggled with Mahatma Gandhi for India’s independence
from the British. As a spiritual leader, Bacha Khan also
practiced and taught the ethics of Islamic “sageness“ and
enlightenment—the basic moral principles of Pashtunwali
and the indigenous, egalitarian-minded Pashtun society
that are fully aligned with universal humanism and bonding.
As Malala pointed out at the UN, “Pashtuns want education
for their daughters and sons. “ Malala’s narrative identifies
the root causes of conflicts and how diverse perspectives
and divisions have led to the development of extremist
beliefs and practices among some Muslims, including those
concerning gender roles and the complex relationships
and agendas created in war and peace. One of the most
notorious groups promoting these extremist beliefs and
practices in Afghanistan and Pakistan as “true” Islam is the
Taliban. Ultimately, Malala’s arguments provide a venue to
study and analyze the lives and struggle of Pashtuns and
Muslims and to address the root causes of conflict and war
being played out in her land.
Radical Islamic Extremism
In Malala’s story we see how the rise of the Taliban and
their supporters in Swat and other areas of Pakistan and
Afghanistan was fueled by transformational political and
cultural factors, such as the Islamization policies pursued
by the regime of Pakistan’s General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s;
the U.S.-sponsored curriculum (published with support of
the University of Nebraska), which taught schoolchildren the
basics of counting with illustrations featuring Kalashnikovs,
tanks, and land mines and glorified Jihadi culture; the
impact of Westernization and wars of aggression waged
by Western nations in South Asia and the Middle East, and
the growth of development and other schemes focused on
increasing women’s rights in Muslim-majority nations. Some
Muslims became radicalized as a result of the direct support
and encouragement by the West, and some understood
this to be a war on their religion and culture(s), and/or their
RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM 18

governments’ pandering to the agendas of Western nations.
The third aspect of this thematic study explores the issue of
religious extremism in light of factors like these in order to
answer key questions that have been posed since the rise
of religious extremism among groups claiming to represent
Islam. Some of these questions include the following: If
Islam is not predisposed to extremism, as so many Muslims
and non-Muslims alike have tried to show, then how
should we understand the rise of extremist groups like the
Taliban And why have such groups attacked the rights of
women and girls in particular as a key part of their (mis)
interpretation of Islam in the 20th and 21st centuries
Islam: A Progressive Force for Change
Malala’s advocacy and activism exemplify a growing trend
across the Muslim world: how women and girls have been
contributing to the transformation of Islam as a force for
peace and progressive change. This trend began in the
early 1990s, when scholars and activists began speaking
of a specifically “Islamic” feminism that espoused gender
equity (or equality) and that focused on defining women’s
rights issues through the lens of Islamic frameworks of
understanding. Some call this the “gender jihad” after
scholar-activist Amina Wadud’s book. The idea of a “gender
jihad,” or battle waged for women’s full human rights, has
taken place over the past three decades through a number
of different and often crosscutting frameworks, such as legal
rights, political participation, and greater representation in
educational institutions and the formal labor market.
Indonesia provides one of the most striking examples:
With the overthrow of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s,
the new government of Abdurrahman Wahid committed
itself to fostering gender equality. Seeking to bring more
women into the mainstream of public space, the state
encouraged women to enroll in the pesantren, or Islamic
schools (which constitute about 35 percent of all schools
in Indonesia). Afterward, many of these graduates not
only became professors in Islamic universities, they also
became successful advocates for women’s rights issues,
including marriage and divorce rights, and anti-domestic
violence campaigns. In Egypt, Morocco, and India, Muslim
feminists and grassroots activists from across the political
and ideological spectrum have waged similar battles for
changes to “family law” (marriage, divorce, child custody,
and inheritance, all governed by Islamic sharia in these
countries), using textual exegesis of the Qur’an and hadith
to argue for women’s rights. Recently, the governments
of Afghanistan and Pakistan have sought to increase state
control of the religious schools (dini madaris in Urdu) to
combat gender stereotypes and encourage girls’ greater
participation in these institutions. With increased access
to the type of religious education that promotes the
tolerant, gender-egalitarian, and humanistic aspects of
Islam, women and girls and their male supporters alike are
increasingly using the foundational texts and teachings of
the religion (such as the Qur’an and hadith) to advocate for
gender equity, in particular the right to equal educational
opportunities for Muslim girls and women.
P A R T 2
Individual Activities
Analytical research paper(s)
The(se) research paper(s) will engage one of the
following themes:
• the forms that Islam can take in different cultural
contexts (including and especially in Pakistan)
• compare and contrast Islam and forms of religious
extremism in light of past and current debates about
women and gender (e.g., that women should not
be too highly educated, since their primary role is to
become wives and mothers; that the mixing of the
genders in public spaces leads to the moral corruption
of women; that gender segregation is a way of
“protecting” women from the vices of men in public
spaces; that women are a temptation and a vice to be
avoided by men; that a man should never be “ruled”
by a woman; that Islam gives men the right to beat
their wives; that a woman’s body and hair are awra
[sexually arousing] and thus should be completely
covered from the eyes of unrelated men). Relate one
or more of these issues to events that take place in the
book. What is the range of attitudes you can discern
about “Islamic propriety” regarding the relationships
between men and women (in private, domestic, and
wider/common public spaces)
• how are women and girls contributing to the
transformation of Islam as a force for progressive
change What concurrent factors (e.g., political,
economic, cultural, social) have helped bring about
these transformations Which of these factors stood
out as germane to Malala’s story (and the evolving
story of girls’ education in Pakistan and around
the world)
RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM 19

Individual PowerPoint presentation (narrated in
class, or with recorded narration)
The presentation should touch upon one of the themes
explored in this lesson: similarities and differences in the
practice of Islam (“lived Islam”) in various cultural contexts,
Islam vs. religious extremism, or Islam and gender activism.
The presentation may be narrated in person in class, or
designed as a pre-recorded narration.
In-class narration
The PowerPoint presentation should touch on one of
the following themes in a single country or cultural (e.g.,
Pakistani, Pashtun, Swati) context. The presentation must
consist of at least 12 slides (including title slide), all of which
are directly relevant to your chosen subject and theme. You
should create slides using both images and words, but you
may choose how many of each to use. Present this slide
show in class, with explanation of the content you have
included on the slides.
Recorded narration
You must narrate the slides in addition to providing citations
and notes to support your data. Narrations need not be
extensive, though they should be detailed and specific.
Keep the entire narrated presentation between 7 and 10
minutes long.
P A R T 3
Group Activities
Roundtable debate
For this assignment, each participant chooses a position to
defend with three pieces of evidence. The debate can be
designed to take up an entire class session, Alternatively,
each participant may be given five to seven minutes to
speak, with classwide discussion taking place at the end of
each roundtable.
Joint PowerPoint presentation
This presentation would be similar to the one described
above, and would similarly touch on one of the themes
outlined for the analytical research paper, but in multiple
country/cultural contexts (with each panelist taking on
a single country). This could be presented in class, with
responses/questions from the entire class coming at the
end of the presentation, or online, with pre-recorded
narrations from each panelist. Responses to the presentation
from other class members may also be included as part of
this assignment: Responses will be posted to online class
discussion boards, chat rooms, or other collaborative venues
(such as Blackboard Collaborate).
RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM 20

P A R T 4
Resources
Abdellatif, Omayma and Marina Ottaway, “Women in
Islamist Movements: Toward an Islamist Model of Women’s
Activism.“ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Carnegie Papers No. 2, June 2007. Pp. 1-13.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Arnez, Monika. 2010. “Empowering Women Through Islam:
Fatayat NU between Tradition and Change.” Journal of
Islamic Studies, vol. 21, no. 1: 59-88.
Badran, Margot. “Understanding Islam, Islamist, and Islamic
Feminism,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 13, no. 1 (2001):
47-52.
Badran, Margot. Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious
Convergences. London: Oneworld Books, 2009.
Doorn-Harder, Pieternella van. Women Shaping Islam:
Reading the Qur’an in Indonesia. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2006.
Doorn-Harder, Pieternella van and Andree Feillard. “A New
Generation of Islamic Feminists Within Traditional Islam.
An Indonesian Exception. ” In Jajat Burhanudin and Kees
van Dijk, eds. Islam in Indonesia. Contrasting Images and
Interpretations. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University
Press, 2013.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Rahman, Bushra H. “Framing of Pakistani Muslim Women
in International Media: Muslim Feminist’s Perspective.”
American International Journal of Contemporary Research,
vol. 2, no. 1 (January 2012): 106-113.
Rinaldo, Rachel. Mobilising Piety: Islam and Feminism in
Indonesia. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Salime, Zakia. Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights
and Sharia Law in Morocco. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
Wadud, Amina. Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred
Text From a Woman’s Perspective. NY; Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1999.
Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in
Islam. Oxford: Oneworld Books, 2006.
Zia, Afiya Shehrbano. “The reinvention of feminism in
Pakistan.” Feminist Review, vol. 91 (2009): 29–46.
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM 21

MALALA AND
VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN AND GIRLS
BY MARY ELLSBERG
P A R T 1
Introduction
The attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban for
speaking out for girls’ education and peace can be viewed
as an isolated act by religious extremists. But it is also
emblematic of the discrimination and violence that women
and girls throughout the world are subjected to because
of their gender. This narrative will explore the global
phenomenon of violence against women and girls through
the lens of Malala’s story by addressing the following topics:
1. One girl’s story: Malala’s story as an act of violence
against women and girls
2. The world as we know it: Violence against
women today
3. Taking action: Standing up to violence against
women and girls
One Girl’s Story: Malala’s Story as an Act of
Violence Against Women and Girls
In the first pages of her memoir, Malala points out how
poorly girls are valued in her community and in the Muslim
world, as compared with boys. “When I was born, people
in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody
congratulated my father… I was a girl in a land where
rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters
are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply
to prepare food and give birth to children” (Page 13)
Malala’s upbringing was unusual for her setting: Her father
encouraged her to excel academically, to speak up, and
to dream of a future where she could participate actively
in society, as a doctor, a politician, or whatever else she
desired. These aspirations led her to reject the growing
restrictions on her education and mobility by the Taliban
and to speak out publicly to defend her own rights and
those of her schoolmates.
The Taliban’s violent response was an attempt not only to
silence Malala’s voice as a human rights defender and peace
activist but also to reinforce patriarchal and extremist values
that keep women and girls in the shadows of society. Sadly,
Malala’s story is not unique. Throughout the world, girls
are neglected, denied education, physically mistreated,
sexually abused, sold into slavery, mutilated, and married
against their will in the name of tradition, religion, honor,
and male entitlement. Women’s human rights defenders
are threatened, beaten, raped, and murdered in order to
keep them from speaking out. There is not a country in
the world devoid of abuse, violence, and discrimination
against women. However, thanks to the courage of girls
like Malala and men like Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala’s father,
international efforts to end all forms of discrimination
and violence against women and girls have become
increasingly visible.
MALALA AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS 22

The World as We Know It: Violence Against
Women and Girls Today
“It’s not just the Taliban killing children… Sometimes it’s
drone attacks, sometimes it’s wars, sometimes it’s hunger.
And sometimes it’s their own family. In June two girls my
age were murdered in Gilgit … for posting a video online
showing themselves dancing in the rain wearing traditional
dress and headscarves. Apparently their own stepbrother
shot them.” (I am Malala, Page 312)
Violence against women and girls, also referred to as
gender-based violence, is one of the most pervasive
and underreported human rights violations in the world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that
approximately one in three women in the world will
experience physical or sexual violence at some point in
their lives. 1 This violence takes many forms, from physical
and sexual assault by intimate partners and family members
to child marriage, trafficking, female genital mutilation,
femicide, and violence in the name of “honor,” tradition, or
religion. The types of violence that women and girls face
vary according to their social, ethnic, cultural, and religious
background, their economic circumstances, and their age.
What links all these acts is that they are overwhelmingly
more likely to be committed by men against women and
that the main purpose of the violence is to maintain a system
of women’s subordination to men.
According to the United Nations Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993), violence
against women “…refers to any act of gender-based
violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual
or psychological harm or suffering to women, including
threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of
liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”
This definition includes but is not limited to:
• physical violence, such as slapping, kicking, hitting,
or use of weapons
• emotional abuse, such as systematic humiliation,
controlling behavior, degrading treatment, insults,
and threats
• sexual violence, including coerced sex or being
forced into sexual activities considered degrading
or humiliating
• denial of resources, services, and opportunities
also known as economic abuse, such as restricting
access to financial, health, educational, or other
resources with the purpose of controlling or
subjugating a person
Violence against women and girls can take place within
the family and the community; it can be perpetrated or
condoned by governments or social structures. Both men
and women can be victims or agents of violence, but the
characteristics of violence commonly committed against
women and men differ. Women and girls are much more
likely than men to be physically assaulted or murdered by
someone they know—often a family member or intimate
partner. They are also at much greater risk of being sexually
assaulted or exploited, in childhood, adolescence, or
adulthood. Men are the main perpetrators of violence
against men as well as against women. 2
The costs of violence against women and girls are
enormous, for women themselves, their families, and for
society as a whole. The impact of violence on women’s
health and well-being has been documented in serious
health problems ranging from injuries, chronic pain, and
gastrointestinal disorders to mental health problems such
as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as well
as pregnancy complications, and sexually transmitted
infections, including HIV/AIDS. Intimate partner violence
is a major cause of death among women, due to femicide
as well as suicide. Women who are physically abused in
pregnancy are more likely to have a low-birth-weight baby,
and to have a child die before the age of 5. The effects of
violence extend to future generations; boys who witness
their father’s violence against their mothers are more likely
to abuse their own partners, and girls who witness violence
are more likely to experience violence as adolescents
and adults. 3
The economic and social costs of violence are also
significant. The World Bank estimates that the costs of
intimate partner violence, in terms of lost productivity and
public expenditures, are as much as 2 percent of GDP, which
is more than many countries spend on primary education.
Violence is also a major barrier to girls’ education. Several
studies in Africa and South Asia have found that sexual
violence in schools is common, and many girls drop out
of school because of violence, unintended pregnancy, or
being married by their families, often to much older men. 4
1
WHO, LSTHM, and MRC. Global and Regional Estimates of Violence Against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence
and Non-partner Sexual Violence. 2013 pg. 2.
2
Morrison, A, Ellsberg, M, Bott, S. Addressing Gender-Based Violence: A Critical Review of Interventions. The World Bank Research Observer 2007;
22, 25-51.
3
Ellsberg, M., H. A. Jansen, et al. Intimate partner violence and women’s physical and mental health in the WHO multi-country study on women’s
health and domestic violence: an observational study. The Lancet 2008; 371(9619): 1165-72.
4
World Bank Group (2014). Voice and agency: Empowering women and girls for shared prosperity. Washington, D.C.
MALALA AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS 23

Despite the high costs of violence against women and girls,
laws and social norms in nearly every society in the world
legitimize, obscure, and deny abuse. The same acts that
would be punished if directed at an employer, a neighbor,
or an acquaintance often go unchallenged when men direct
them at women, especially within the family.
The causes of violence against women and girls are complex
and shaped by forces operating at the levels of individuals,
relationships, communities, and societies. Key risk factors
include exposure to violence as a child, low educational
levels of men and women, male alcohol abuse, male
control of household decision making and wealth, cultural
norms supporting violence as a way of resolving conflicts,
male dominance over women, and policies and laws that
discriminate against women, for example, by restricting
their mobility, ability to get divorce, and rights to property
and assets. In many countries some forms of violence (for
example, marital rape) are not criminalized, and women
often suffer additional stigma and abuse when they try to
report violence committed against them to their families,
police, and other authorities. 5
Taking Action: Standing Up to Violence
Against Women and Girls
For over three decades, women’s advocacy groups
around the world have focused attention on the physical,
psychological, and sexual abuse of women and called for
political action. They have provided abused women with
shelter, lobbied for legal reforms, and challenged the
widespread attitudes and beliefs that support violence
against women and girls. Increasingly, these efforts are
having an effect, and now policies and laws to address
violence against women and girls figure prominently on the
international development agenda. Numerous international
documents, including the Beijing Platform for Action and
the United Nations Resolution on the Elimination of Violence
Against Women, commit governments to take necessary
measures to eliminate violence against women and girls,
and establish indicators for monitoring governments’
progress. According to a recent World Bank report, 6 75 out
of 100 countries studied have enacted laws to criminalize
domestic violence and sexual violence against women.
Even the U.N. Security Council has passed several landmark
resolutions addressing sexual violence in conflict settings 7
and recognizing the necessity of including women’s
voices in peace and security issues. To date, most efforts
have focused on increasing women’s access to justice,
through better laws to protect women and girls and to
increase sanctions on offenders, as well as providing safe
haven and compassionate care for survivors of violence.
Although these constitute important first steps, experience
has shown that laws and services by themselves are not
sufficient to effectively improve the lives of women and
girls, as evidenced by Malala’s struggle for girls’ education.
Prevention of violence is equally important, and the
cornerstone of prevention is ensuring that women have
access to the information, education, resources, and ability
to make decisions regarding their lives.
A key component of violence prevention involves
challenging social norms regarding appropriate roles
and responsibilities for men and women. According to
the World Health Organization’s Multi-country Study on
Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women 8 ,
women in many countries believed that a husband
would be justified in beating his wife for reasons such as
disobedience, impertinence, failure to prepare food on
time or adequately care for the children, questions about
money or girlfriends, ventures outside the home without
permission, refusing sex, or suspicions of infidelity. All of
these represent transgressions of dominant gender norms
in many societies. Malala’s courage in challenging traditional
views of appropriate behavior for girls in her community
is an inspiration for women and girls everywhere who are
standing up for their right to education, to work, to marry
when and whom they choose, and to live free from violence
of any kind.
5
Heise, L. (1998). Violence against women: An integrated, ecological framework. Violence Against Women, 4(3), 262-290.
6
World Bank and International Finance Corporation, Women, Business and the Law 2014.
7
See U.N. Resolution 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122 http://www.un.org/en/sc/documents/resolutions/index.shtml
8
World Health Organization. The WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women; Preliminary Findings.
Geneva, 2005.
MALALA AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS 24

P A R T 2
Individual Activities
“Other Malalas”: There are many other Malalas around
the world, such as Fahma Mohamed, who spearheaded a
campaign to provide education on female genital mutilation
(FGM) in British schools, or Laxmi, the young woman in India
who nearly died from having acid thrown in her face, and
who now leads efforts to end acid assaults against women.
Research and write a short biography about these or other
“Malalas,” who can be either international or local figures. In
your essay, consider the following:
• The form of violence she is protesting,
notably its links to culture and tradition
• Her efforts to eliminate violence
• The challenges she has faced
• The progress she is making
• What will it take for this form of violence to
be eliminated
Different forms of violence: Violence against women takes
many forms. Students will research and present to the class
some of the many forms of violence against women that
exist in the world today. These may include:
• Acid burning
• Female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C)
• Human trafficking
• Violence committed in the name of honor
• Child marriage
• Intimate partner violence
• Rape
• Violence against special groups of women
(immigrants, women with disabilities,
indigenous women)
• Other
In their projects, students will research where the form
of violence is prevalent, what is its prevalence, and what
measures are being taken to eliminate this form of violence.
Measures may include national legislation, including
enforcement, as well as civil society initiatives such as
media campaigns, hotlines, shelters, and citizen activism.
The essay will conclude by examining the effectiveness of
these measures and raising questions as to what needs to
happen next.
Standing up to violence against women and girls:
Organizations and activists in every country and community
advocate for women’s rights and an end to violence against
women and girls. Other campaigns, such as the 16 Days
of Activism against Gender Violence, the White Ribbon
Campaign, One Man Can, One Billion Rising, and Girls
Not Brides, are global campaigns to raise awareness and
encourage communities to stand up to violence. Students
will research a group or campaign in their own country or
community that is working to end violence against women
and write a short essay about the organization/campaign.
The essay should consider the following:
• How did the program start
• What kind of violence does it address
• What kind of approach does the program use Is it
trying to strengthen women’s access to justice To
provide support for survivors of violence To change
social norms that support violence To improve
national laws and polices
• What have been the program’s most important
achievements and challenges
MALALA AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS 25

P A R T 3
Group Activities
Film: Students will watch one of the suggested films
addressing violence against women today. These can
include Girl Rising, Half the Sky, Very Young Girls, Maria en
Tierra de Nadie, among others.
Bring in guest speakers from a community program for
battered women or from groups that work to prevent
violence against women and girls to talk about their work.
Students read out loud in small groups the biography they
wrote (in Individual Activity 1) and compare/contrast their
lives with those of their chosen “Malala.” This would include
reflecting on their upbringing and the elements they may
have taken for granted, and how this has led to their current
situation of privilege (or not). Elements could include
education, health, social norms, social support networks,
broader legal system/protection, etc., that have enabled
them to be where they are today.
P A R T 4
Resources
Films:
Girl Rising, Half the Sky, Very Young Girls,
Maria en Tierra de Nadie
Publications:
Heise, L. L. (2011). What Works to Prevent Partner Violence
An Evidence Overview. London, U.K., STRIVE Research
Consortium, London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine: xvii+108 pp.
Kristof, N & WuDunn, S. (2009). Half the Sky: Turning
Oppression into Opportunity Worldwide.
Morrison, A, Ellsberg, M, Bott, S. Addressing Gender-Based
Violence: A Critical Review of Interventions. The World Bank
Research Observer 2007; 22, 25-51.
Solotaroff, Jennifer L., and Rohini Prabha Pande. 2014.
Violence Against Women and Girls: Lessons From South
Asia. South Asia Development Forum. Washington, D.C.:
World Bank.
World Bank Group (2014). Voice and Agency: Empowering
Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity. Washington, D.C.
World Health Organization. The WHO Multi-country Study
on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women;
Preliminary Findings. Geneva, 2005.
Websites:
(Organizations that work to end violence against women)
Breakthrough:
http://breakthrough.tv
Futures without Violence:
www.Futureswithoutviolence.org
GBV Prevention Network:
www.preventGBVAfrica.org
Half the Sky Movement:
www.halfthesky.org
International Center for Research on Women (ICRW):
www.icrw.org
Women Thrive:
www.womenthrive.org
Equality Now:
www.equalitynow.org
Vital Voices:
www.vitalvoices.org
Women for Women:
www.womenforwomen.org
UN Women:
www.unwomen.org
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
MALALA AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS 26

MALALA
LEADERSHIP
ESSAY
BY MARY BUCKLEY
P A R T 1
Introduction
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
Malala Yousafzai, a young social change leader in Pakistan’s
Swat Valley, works on the basic human right of equal
access to education for children around the world. Her
vision stems from childhood experiences, and her political
actions address needs she first identified within her local
community. With strong support from her father, and a newly
established foundation, Malala engages local participants,
government administrators, and world leaders to advocate
for policies that will effectively provide education to all
citizens. This essay will examine Malala’s leadership work,
recognized internationally, through the following learning
objectives:
• Leadership theories
• Malala’s leadership style
• Leadership goals and strategies
• Collective action
Background
While Malala was in primary school, Taliban forces took
control in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, and they issued a
decree that all girls’ schools be closed. Parents and teachers
were threatened if they refused to comply. Malala’s daily
walk to school became dangerous when the Taliban patrols
exerted power over the community’s institutions and
directed the local women to cover themselves, stay indoors,
and travel with a male protector. Because these directives
were framed as deriving from religious teachings and were
filtered through the valley in print and radio broadcasts,
some community members sympathized with the edicts
and joined the Taliban ranks and many chose to be silent.
Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala’s father, was one of the few who
spoke on national and international media resisting the
Taliban’s decree while promoting the rights of children to
an education. He opposed the mandate and continued to
keep his school open. In her memoir, Malala wrote of her
father’s actions and of the challenges Swat Valley social
institutions encountered from political and religious factions.
Eventually her actions gained outside community support
and contributed to shaping a larger platform for universal
access to education.
Leadership Overview
The concept of leadership is conditioned by cultural,
religious, economic, political, and social conditions, and it is
informed by historical and contemporary stories. Leadership
topics can be traced throughout history; both the Iliad
and the Odyssey reference effective leadership qualities,
and philosophers from Plato to Confucius, wrestled with
the subject. For Muslims, Prophet Muhammad’s 1 life and
actions serve as a model of good leadership. Legends,
folk tales, adventure stories, and religious narratives detail
individual feats or events that inspire a community to action
and instill values.
An important historical figure for Pakistani and Afghan
schoolchildren in the Pashtun culture is Malalai of Maiwand,
for whom Malala Yousafzai is named. In 1880, Malalai,
1
The salawat, “salah allahu alaihi wa sallam”, is a phrase that Muslims use to pronounce blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad. Sometimes the
phrase is abbreviated as SAW or PBUH for “peace be upon him,” but these abbreviations are controversial and to some, suggest a lack of respect.
With this in mind, we have used the full salawat in Arabic, as a superscript, in line with contemporary literary conventions seen in texts about Islam.
MALALA LEADERSHIP ESSAY 27

a young Afghanistan heroine, rallied Pashtun people to
continue their battle against British invaders. Malalai’s story
inspires Pashtun identity and core values, while connecting
succeeding generations to Pashtunwali, the code of the
Pashtuns, which includes centuries-old traditional principles
of courage and generosity. In her text, Malala claims this
leader as “our very own Joan of Arc.” (Yousafzai 15)
Though no universally accepted definition of leadership
exists, many contemporary writers identify leadership
as a complex process that involves the engagement of
a community working toward a shared goal, vision, or
interest. Leaders act as a catalyst within an organization or
community: initiating collective action around a common
interest, accepting responsibility for completion of stated
goals, communicating the community’s position with outside
partners, and exhibiting courage in the face of conflict.
The essential characteristics for a successful leader include
vision, self-knowledge, critical thinking and problem-solving
capacity, adept communication skills, personal integrity, and
responsibility. At the outset of the text, Malala reveals her
vision: a concept of equal access to education. Speaking
at public events, first as an apprentice to her father and
later as a featured guest, she has developed language
skills and reasoning ability to effectively communicate her
vision. When an opportunity opens for more dialogue or
action, Malala seizes the invitation. She writes about her fear
of public speaking and the greater responsibility to carry
out the mission of access to education. In interviews, she
responds insightfully to questions about the actions and
decisions that affect education rights globally.
Charismatic leaders motivate and inspire others to take
action. Malala identifies Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s former
prime minister, as a powerful role model who embodied
leadership qualities of charisma, political astuteness, and
tough opposition to rivals. Prime Minister Bhutto received
the 2008 United Nations Prize for Human Rights; following
in her role model’s footsteps, Malala Yousafzai was a 2013
recipient of the same prize. Recognizing the importance of
community participation to effect significant policy change,
Malala does not present herself as a heroic leader but as
a humble and responsible member of a working group. In
a 2013 U.N. speech to other young education advocates,
Malala identified herself as “one girl among many,” and she
spoke of the philosophy of nonviolence learned from the
work of Bacha Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa.
Integrity is viewed as an essential trait for effective leaders.
Participants are willing to invest when they can rely on
the leader’s core values; trust inspires confidence. Malala
accepts responsibility for working within existing community
structures to implement change, and she speaks for those
without a public platform. Writing about the U.N. speech she
delivered in 2013, she states: “Deep in my heart I hoped to
reach every child who could take courage from my words
and stand up for his or her rights.” (Yousafzai 310) She
intended her speech to reach beyond the delegates in the
room, to travel deep into the fault lines of poverty and give
others hope and support.
Theories on Leadership:
Western and Islamic Perspectives
Historically, stories of leaders who have inspired group
actions often emphasize three elements: distinct traits,
aspects of a leader’s engagement with committed
followers working to achieve end goals, and the situational
environment or landscape that influences group actions.
Current leadership literature combines the identified
elements and points toward a nuanced interpretation of
leadership as a process, recognizing the fluid interplay
among constituent parts of individual, community, and
situation. James MacGregor Burns adds to leadership
literature with a discussion of the ethical/moral dimension
of leadership. Writing about the collective responsibility
of citizens to work toward alleviating human rights
needs worldwide, he states: “The task of leadership is to
accomplish some change in the world…. Its actions and
achievements are measured by the supreme public values
that themselves are the profoundest expressions of human
wants: liberty and equality, justice and opportunity, the
pursuit of happiness.” (Burns, Transforming Leadership 4)
A. Leadercentric Theories - Traits, Skills, and Style
Traditional Western leadership theory first identified specific
leader traits or characteristics derived from great man
stories. Professional skills or knowledge competencies and
behavior actions or style were identified, mid 20th century,
as integral components providing additional tools for
assessing successful leaders.
1. Trait leadership theory, first identified in the early
20th century, recognized characteristics attributed
to the leader. Research on leadership traits “points
to six key traits: intelligence, confidence, charisma,
determination, sociability and integrity.” (Northouse,
Introduction to Leadership 27) Today, leadership
scholars acknowledge these leadership traits as a
valuable component in the scope of leadership theory,
while also recognizing the limits of a leadercentric
perspective. Traits analysis focuses on the leader,
without acknowledging the important exchange
between leader and follower; and it does not account
for different situational needs. Additionally, the
demands of working with one group may require traits
not appropriate or necessary in other settings.
MALALA LEADERSHIP ESSAY 28

2. Skills leadership theory, first explored by Robert
Katz in 1955, identified “skills and abilities that can
be learned and developed.” (Northouse, Leadership
Theory and Practice 35) Katz positioned management
leadership capacity to include technical proficiency
skills, human or people skills, and conceptual/idea
skills. In the past 20 years researchers have greatly
expanded the skills leadership theory and identified
a skills-based leadership model that speaks to
the potential of individuals to develop leadership
competencies in problem solving, social judgment
abilities, and knowledge competencies. (Northouse,
Leadership Theory and Practice 39)
3. Style leadership theory analyzes leaders’ actions as
they “facilitate goal accomplishment … and nurture
the community participants.” (Northouse, Leadership
Theory and Practice 65) Both actions are joined to
accommodate successful goal achievement. How the
leader communicates and works with followers and
facilitates interactions with outside community actors
is studied to frame an analysis of the leader’s style.
B. Leader/Follower Leadership Theories – Transactional,
Transformational, and Social Change
Early Western leadership literature focused on the leader
or the follower, but it did not investigate vital relationships
between leader and follower. In 1978 James MacGregor
Burns identified transactional and transformational
leadership styles that examined the role of leader/follower
relationships. Another addition to leadership theory, the
social change leadership model, developed as a collegiate
training program defining a “purposeful, collaborative,
values-based process that results in positive social change.”
(Komives and Wagner xii)
1. The transactional leader engages in an exchange
with followers, based on a system of rewards
and benefits.
2. The transformational leader gets the community to
invest in the common goal and transcend individual
rewards for greater community needs.
3. The two core elements of the Social Change Model
state that leadership is tied to social responsibility
and the common good, and that leadership functions
as a collaborative process. Every participant is a
stakeholder in SCM, and the leader role may shift in
response to the organization’s needs.
C. Islamic Leadership Values
In Muslim countries, the life and work of Prophet
Muhammad has had a profound influence on leadership
models. The Prophet’s words, actions, and life choices serve
as a role model for thoughtful leadership. John Adair in a
treatise on the leadership of Prophet Muhammad writes:
“Islam today is both an inheritor of the world’s body of
knowledge about leadership and … a great contributor to
it.” (Adair 110)
Muslim leaders’ actions are influenced by Islamic religious
values of honesty, integrity, equality, truthfulness, and
sincerity. (Khan and Varshney). Self-awareness is considered
one key leadership trait, and it “involves thankfulness and
respect for Allah and His creation (the Quaranic concept of
at-taqwá)… Additional qualities a leader exhibits are “purity
(taharat), patient perseverance, and steadfastness (sabr).”
(Danielewicz-Betz 140)
In Islam, “leadership is based on trust (amanah)” and “the
focus is on doing good.” (Danielewicz-Betz 140) These
deeply rooted spiritual ideas drive Malala’s understanding
of effective community participation and inspire her work
and active citizenship. In her memoir, Malala references
core values from religion, family, and teachers as significant
guiding principles that inform her understanding and
perception of community. She proudly locates herself within
a specific cultural and religious community, identifying the
basic values and needs of the group through a generous
description of family and community lives.
Conclusion
Writing with passion and conviction, Malala reveals personal
stories and insightful observations across the intersections
of everyday life and the existing power structures of
Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She acknowledges support from
both community and world leaders, evaluating the progress
of the journey thus far. She works within the community
to invest in the common good and develop capacity in
followers working toward equal access to education. She
speaks to authority figures as an advocate and community
action driver, representing the group’s needs. Within this
dialogue, she reveals her charisma as she channels hope
through an optimistic attitude that change is possible. Her
story reveals the active process of engaging others to join
the cause for equal access to education and accept social
responsibility for change.
MALALA LEADERSHIP ESSAY 29

WORKS CITED
Adair, John. The Leadership of Muhammad. London:
Kogan Page, 2010.
Bass, Bernard M. Handbook of Leadership. New York: Macmillan,
Inc., 1990.
Burns, James MacGregor. Leadership. New York: Harper &
Row, 1978.
—. Transforming Leadership. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.
Danielewicz-Betz, Anna M. “Glocalization of Leadership and Cultural
Implications for Higher Education: A German-Saudi Case.” Culture
and Gender in Leadership. Ed. James Rajasekar and Loo-See Beh.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Khan, Sami A. and Deepanjana Varshney. “Transformational
Leadership in the Saudi Arabian Cultural Context: Prospects and
Challenges.” Culture and Gender in Leadership. Ed. James Rajaseker
and Loo-See Beh. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Komives, Susan R. and Wendy Wagner. Leadership for a Better
World: Understanding the Social Change Model of Leadership
Development. San Francisco: National Clearinghouse for Leadership
Programs, 2009.
Komives, Susan, Nance Lucas and Timothy R. McMahon. Exploring
Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Change. San
Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013.
Northouse, Peter G. Introduction to Leadership. Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications Inc., 2012.
—. Leadership Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,
Inc., 2004.
Shankman, Marcy L. and Scott J. Allen. Emotionally Intelligent
Leadership: A Guide for College Students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2008.
Shea, Erin E. O’Brien & Jennifer. Gender and Women’s Leadership,
A Reference Handbook. Ed. Karen O’Connor. Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, Inc., 2010.
Yousafzai, Malala. I Am Malala. Little Brown and Company, 2013.
P A R T 2
Individual Activities
Maintain a reflective leadership journal, using the
prompts below:
1. Malala and Leadership
Evaluate Malala in terms of leadership theories. Find
examples from the text that pair with the leadership
traits and styles found in the leadership narrative. Pair
one trait or style with each quote, and then elaborate
on why this excerpt fits with the leadership discussion.
2. Leadership Role Models
Malala references Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and
Malalai of Maiwand as role models. Develop and
articulate your view of leadership through a paper
that includes examples of four leaders, two from your
life experiences and two nationally or internationally
recognized. What are their individual styles, actions,
and traits How did they gain their leadership position
Did the leader emerge from an existing community
or organization Did they start a community around a
shared goal Were they appointed or elected to the
position How successful were they in achieving
their goal
In the text, Malala defines the importance of role
models. Why were you drawn to the leaders you
identify Are they role models for you Do you see
yourself working in one of these fields What can you
do now to position yourself for this work
3. Vision
Malala clearly defines her vision for equal access to
education throughout the text. Her work develops
incrementally as she explores the issue. Can you
outline the steps that led her from a local to a national
platform Where did she begin to define the issue
How did she communicate the ideas Who were her
different audiences
For you, what are three to five things that you want
to accomplish by the end of this year For each goal,
what are the two or three tasks that will help you
reach that goal How will you measure your progress
toward those goals: weekly, bi-weekly, monthly Will
these goals engage others How will you establish a
consistent group action plan
MALALA LEADERSHIP ESSAY 30

4. Community Engagement
List community organizations within your locale,
connect with one of these organizations, and volunteer
10 hours or more with the group. Keep a journal about
the experience. Note the leadership structure within
the volunteer group. How do you interact with others
who are not close friends Who takes responsibility
How is that manifested Is there a group dynamic
How do you build trust with others Are you taking any
risks, moving outside your comfort zone
5. Self-Knowledge
Take the Myers-Briggs Test at
http://www humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.
asp#questionnaire. Score the test to identify
your strengths.
P A R T 3
Group Activities
Share group results online. Use charts, visuals, and video to
enhance the findings.
1. Presentation of a leadership topic or quote
Each student is responsible for introducing a
leadership quote, thought, or exercise into one class
meeting for group discussion.
2. Leadership characteristics identified
Create a list of leaders from different fields and
different nationalities: arts, politics, government,
entertainment, sports, human rights, community
action forums, education, finance, or other.
Brainstorm together for Nos. 1–3; work alone for No.
4, dividing up the leaders among the group members;
collaborate for No. 5 to create a leadership packet and
identify individual skill and knowledge competencies
to assign roles of editor, publisher, online manuscript
designer, and any other tasks involved.
1. Next to each leader list one to three characteristics,
qualities, or traits the leader has exhibited that are
essential for effective leadership in that field.
2. List the main accomplishment of that leader.
3. In what situation has the leader developed:
community structure, hierarchal, government
And what is the leadership structure within that
specific field: authoritative, collaborative, elective,
transformational, transactional
4. Write up a short leadership briefing on each
leader; include media or printed resource
materials for background information.
5. Complete an online composite leadership packet.
3. Vision—Work together to identify community
need and create an action plan
1. Identify a community need. Why is change
needed What are the barriers to change
2. Create an action plan or agenda that will address
the issue. What are the real and hidden costs
What are the expected benefits
3. Establish a list of outside partners that need to be
engaged for support.
4. Identify subcommittees that will work on specific
items to support the change.
5. How often and when will the group access
progress
4. Role Playing—Leader/Follower
Each group member develops an action item.
Communicates the idea/concept to the group.
Motivates others to engage in the plan. Facilitates a
group meeting that will work to design and implement
the suggested agenda item. Evaluates progress and
makes changes to move forward.
MALALA LEADERSHIP ESSAY 31

P A R T 4
Resources
Ted Talks on Leadership:
http://www.ted.com/topics/leadership
Malala on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MalalaFund
Mary Robinson Foundation: http://www.mrfcj.org
University of Maryland, National Clearinghouse for
Leadership Programs: https://nclp.umd.edu
Sheryl WuDunn & Nicolas Kristof – Half the Sky Movement:
http://www.halftheskymovement.org/pages/
nicholas-and-sheryl
Komives, Susan, Nance Lucas and Timothy R. McMahon.
Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to
Make a Change. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013.
Shankman, Marcy L. and Scott J. Allen. Emotionally Intelligent
Leadership: A Guide for College Students. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2008.
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
MALALA LEADERSHIP ESSAY 32

MALALA AND
THE MEDIA
BY SEAN ADAY & SILVIO WAISBORD
P A R T 1
Introduction
This discussion of Malala and the media seeks to make
students aware of the complex yet patterned, way in which
the press tends to cover social movements around gender
and women’s rights, especially in the context of foreign
policy issues. This narrative includes the following topics:
• Understanding Malala and the media
• Media influence: agenda setting and framing
• Background: media coverage of social movements
• Background: media coverage of foreign affairs
• Intersection: framing the Malala story
Understanding Malala and the Media
In the West, news coverage of Malala addresses several
questions of interest to media scholars in various disciplines.
Some key questions are: When and why did Malala
become a subject of news attention For how long What
is newsworthy about the story What stories are told about
Malala in the Western media What aspects of Malala’s story
and the issues and communities she represents get different
amount of coverage Addressing these questions helps us
to understand the characteristics, strengths, and limitations
of news about Malala. These questions matter because
Malala is essentially a “news story” and a matter of media
coverage for Western audiences. Their knowledge and their
understanding about Malala as well as the multiple issues
that she evokes are essentially mediated—that is, they are
based on news and images provided by the media.
From this perspective, then, Malala can be reasonably
considered a “news icon”—a point of attention of the
media, which can be individuals, events, and places. A
news icon functions as a gravitational center that holds
media attention. Malala, then, became a news icon about
various issues in the contemporary global world, including
children’s education in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and around
the world; violence, conflict, war, and terrorism; the
conditions of girls in patriarchal societies; gender identity;
and children’s rights.
Media Influence: Agenda Setting and Framing
There are two key concepts for understanding new media
and its effects on public opinion and policymaking: agenda
setting and framing. Agenda setting refers to the wellestablished
power of the press to influence “what people
think about,” even if it doesn’t seem to dictate what people
think. In other words, media don’t appear to make people
violent, but when the press runs a lot of stories over time
about crime, people who read those stories are likely to
say crime is an important problem, whether actual crime
rates would suggest it is or isn’t. Scholars have found this
connection between the media agenda and the public
agenda in numerous studies over the past 40 years.
MALALA AND THE MEDIA 33

As opposed to agenda setting, which is about the quantity
of coverage of an issue, framing is about how that issue is
covered. Virtually every story has many different sides and
potential storylines a journalist could choose to emphasize.
Yet journalists often make patterned decisions to cover
certain types of stories in one way rather than another. In the
same way that looking out a window shows you only part of
the picture, media frames similarly represent only one way
of understanding a story. Political campaigns, for example,
are typically framed in terms of their tactics, strategies, and
personalities—who’s winning and who’s losing—rather
than in terms of issues. Research shows that how stories are
framed often influences how audiences understand and
think about the issues and topics being covered.
Agenda setting and framing are powerful concepts for
understanding the nature of news coverage of Malala’s
story, why it was covered the way it was (and why alternative
frames were downplayed or ignored), and what influence
this might have on shaping public and policy discourse.
For example, we would expect that when media covered
Malala a lot, the public and policymakers might be more
likely to prioritize the issues raised in those stories. But here
is where framing comes in. What aspect of the Malala story
ended up being covered The answer has implications for
what type of information was conveyed and, at its essence,
what “the story” really was.
The following research strategies could be adopted in order
to study the Malala story from agenda setting and framing
perspectives. First, to get at the agenda-setting question,
one would want to literally count the number of stories
about Malala that ran in the media. Here, however, some
choices must be made. Which media are we interested in
TV, radio, newspaper, or digital U.S., Western, Pakistani
How we answer those and other questions depends mostly
on what audiences interest us. For instance, if we are
interested in whether Malala made a difference in shaping
Pakistani public opinion, we’d look at Pakistani media.
Background: Media Coverage of
Social Movements
Malala’s story as a media story can be analyzed in terms
of the opportunities and challenges it brings for social
movements to get media coverage. It is not simply or only
a story about a girl who was a victim of senseless violence
after she defied the Taliban. Her remarkable story has
multiple layers that speak to the interests of many social
movements promoting women and children’s rights,
educational opportunities, gender roles, and the peaceful
resolution of conflicts in South Asia and the world. The
issues that Malala represents suffer a “double invisibility”:
They rank low among top priorities across countries, and
they are generally ignored by the media. These are the
twofold challenges for most social movements: How do
they get attention from the public and policymakers and
become important in political/policy debates How do they
attract media attention to remedy the absence in the public
sphere Since the attack, Malala triumphantly became a
global spokesperson for these issues. She is a news icon—a
news peg for the Western and the global media to cover
various issues.
Given her profile and the issues that Malala represents, it is
worth considering arguments about how social movements
are typically covered in the media. In contrast to political
and economic elites, social movements generally lack
institutional power to make news. What they say and
do is less likely to make news compared with official
and corporate sources who count on well-established
newsmaking mechanisms to churn out information regularly
and enjoy legitimacy as “legitimate” newsmakers in the
media. Therefore, social movements need to rely on
strategies to overcome their disadvantages and gain media
attention. Put differently, unlike elites, movements are in
asymmetrical relations vis-à-vis the media. They need the
media more than the media need them.
Framing works a little differently. Framing is about figuring
out what aspects of the story were selected and prioritized
in stories (e.g., by putting them in story leads, or headlines,
or at the top of the newscast). It also often requires the
researcher to categorize the frames. For instance, we may be
interested in whether some media covered the story more
substantively (or thematically, as it is sometimes referred
to in communication research) or more superficially (or
episodically). Perhaps even more important with a story like
Malala’s, we may be interested in knowing whether media
were more likely to frame her story in terms of conflict in
Pakistan and the local or global gender-based violence and
women’s equality, or in terms of terrorism.
MALALA AND THE MEDIA 34

Whereas some movements refuse to engage with the
rules of the mainstream media, and prefer to rely on their
own media platforms, others pragmatically try to obtain
coverage to publicize their causes. Aside from conventional
newsmaking strategies (e.g., press releases, planned
events), social movements resort to protest and other
forms of public theater as steps to get media attention.
In opting for these actions, they consistently confront
well-documented challenges that are remarkably similar
across movements and countries. They are more likely to
attract news attention when their actions offer elements
of drama, conflict, and media-appealing personalities.
Therefore, social movements are caught in a bind: They
may get news attention if they offer visible elements that
fit the news media’s appetite for such content. If they lack
those elements, they are less likely to get news attention.
Coverage focuses on dramatic and conflictive elements
and on leaders who have media charisma and other
characteristics, thereby distorting the goals, practices,
and organizations of social movements. Also, movements
are more likely to get news attention when their actions
fit typical news values such as geographical and cultural
proximity, large size, and ongoing media narratives. These
biases flatten the complexities of social movements and
the issues they represent. Consequently, media coverage
generally offers a simplistic view that reduces collective
mobilization and social issues to a few images and stories.
Given these well-documented biases, it is worth asking
whether news coverage of Malala confirms such conclusions
or, instead, suggests important differences.
Background: Media Coverage of Foreign Affairs
Over the years mass communication researchers have
consistently found that mainstream media tend to
reinforce dominant sociocultural norms and values, confer
status upon that which is covered (and thus relegate to
“nonevents” that which is not), and make decisions about
coverage that are heavily routinized and source driven.
These conclusions are, if anything, even truer when it comes
to media coverage of foreign affairs. In addition, severe
budget cutbacks in U.S. news divisions since the early 1980s
have led to a drastic reduction in the amount of international
news available to American and Western audiences via the
mainstream media.
In general, foreign policy coverage tends to be (a)
ethnocentric, (b) elite driven, (c) uncritical of official and
military claims, and (d) episodic (e.g., usually covering
other countries when senior White House officials travel to
or otherwise prioritize them). What does this tell us about
media coverage of the Malala story First, it suggests that
international media, especially in the U.S. and other Western
countries, are likely to frame her story through the prism of
the foreign policy priorities and perspectives of the country
where the media originate. In this case, that means that
Malala’s story becomes fused with the overarching story
of the global war on terrorism. Second, it means that the
broader social movement that has arisen around Malala,
like other social movements before it, faces challenges
in transmitting its agenda through the international
mainstream media. That’s because the media are likely to
reinterpret the story for an international audience through
the lens of their own ethnocentrically driven frames and
perspectives. The questions then become: How did
the Malala movement frame itself How was the Malala
movement framed in the press And how did that framing
differ based on the country’s media we’re studying
Intersection: Framing the Malala Story
Previous research suggests that social movements have
difficulty transferring their frames to mainstream media
coverage of them and their issues. The question is, did this
happen with the Malala movement, too If so, in what way(s)
and why If not, why the exception in this case
Based on what we know about coverage of social
movements, gender-related issues, and international affairs,
we might venture some hypotheses about media attention
to Malala that are worth testing. For instance, we might
expect that in the international media, Malala’s story is
likely to be only somewhat about gender-based violence
and women’s empowerment and a lot more about fighting
terrorism. Why Because those topics are the priorities of
Western powers. Similarly, Malala’s attacker is likely to be
mainly understood as Taliban—an enemy of the West—more
than as part of a larger, globalized patriarchal culture—an
enemy of women and, ultimately, everyone. This would not
only change the way international audiences understand
why Malala’s story is important and what lessons we can
draw from it; it also has important implications for the
movement itself. In particular, it creates an incentive to
accept the war on terrorism framed as an entrée to the
media coverage necessary to get one’s broader message
out. The challenge for the Malala movement, as with other
movements, is to find a way to educate the world about that
larger message about conflict, peace, access to education,
and gender equality given these obstacles.
MALALA AND THE MEDIA 35

P A R T 2
Individual and Group Activities
These activities could be conducted as group projects or as
individual research papers. Group projects make it easier
to conduct cross-media and cross-cultural research, while
individual papers develop skills necessary for academic/
think tank writing and publishing.
Students will refer to the narrative in order to address the
following tasks and questions:
• Develop research questions and hypotheses to test
the agenda-setting and framing questions related to
the Malala story.
• Develop a research design to test these research
questions and hypotheses.
• Content analysis: Which media TV, radio, newspaper,
or digital U.S., Western, Pakistani
• Agenda-setting study: Count the number of stories
about Malala that ran in the media.
• Framing study: Framing is about figuring out what
aspects of the story were selected and prioritized
in stories (e.g., by putting them in story ledes, or
headlines, or at the top of the newscast).
• Did some media cover the story more substantively
(or thematically, as it is sometimes referred to in
communication research) or more superficially (or
episodically)
• Were some media more likely to frame her story in
terms of gender-based violence and women’s equality,
or in terms of terrorism And did this vary by the
foreign policy priorities of the media organization’s
home country
P A R T 3
Resources
The following supplemental reading materials
are suggested:
Aday S., Livingston, S. & Hebert, M. (2005b). “Embedding
the Truth: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and
Television Coverage of the Iraq War.” Harvard International
Journal of Press/Politics, 10 (1), 3-21.
Baum, M.A., & Groeling, T. (2010). War Stories: How Strategic
Journalists, Citizens, and Politicians Shape the News About
War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bennett, W.L. (1994). “The News About Foreign Policy.” In
Bennett, W.L. and Paletz, D.L. (eds.). Taken by Storm: The
Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf
War (12-42). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Carter, Cynthia; Steiner, Linda; & McLaughlin, Lisa (eds.). The
Routledge Companion to Media & Gender.
Gitlin, T. (1980). The Whole World Is Watching. Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Iyengar and Simon. “News Coverage of the Gulf Crisis and
Public Opinion” (in Bennett and Paletz), (167-185).
Jacky Repila. The Politics of Our Lives: The Raising Her Voice
in Pakistan Experience, OXFAM GB.
Robinson, P. (1999). “The CNN Effect: Can the News Media
Drive Foreign Policy” Political Communication (25), pp.
301-309.
Wolfsfeld, G. (2004). Media and the Path to Peace.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zaller, J. and Chiu, D. (1996). “Government’s Little Helper:
U.S. Press Coverage of Foreign Policy Crises, 1945-1991.”
Political Communication, 12, 385-405.
Entman, R.M. (2004). Projections of Power: Framing News,
Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
MALALA AND THE MEDIA 36

GLOBAL FEMINISMS:
SPEAKING AND ACTING
ABOUT WOMEN AND GIRLS
BY RACHEL RIEDNER
P A R T 1
Introduction
My discussion of Malala Yousafzai’s powerful book, I Am
Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot
by the Taliban, begins with a simple question: Why and in
what circumstances is it necessary for a young woman make
a call for “peace in every home, every street, every village,
every country… [and] education for every boy and every
girl in the world” (313) The lack of peace, the inability of
girls (and boys) to attend school, and the vulnerability of
young women to gendered violence are not inevitable. As
feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe suggests, the events that
Malala describes are the result of choices that are made
by communities, by nations, by individuals, by families,
by supranational organizations, and by global political
institutions.
This essay will address the following points:
• The role of global feminism in responding to
acts of violence
• Local and global gendered violence
• The violence of representation
• Generating a feminist response
The Role of Feminism in Responding
to Acts of Violence
As feminists look at the world, we have learned to ask
difficult questions about how choices are made. As Enloe
says, we ask “whether anything that passes for inevitable,
inherent, ‘traditional,’ or biological has in fact been made.”
Asking how things are made or why events happen,
suggests they are made by someone. By looking at Malala’s
story as the shooting of a young girl who wanted to attend
school, we can begin to examine the conditions under which
gendered violence became visible and about the motives
of those who give gendered violence attention. Global
feminists ask questions and conduct research in order to
find clues about how to create activist responses. Ultimately
we ask, how can we create change in our own communities,
and create alliances and collaborations with women and
girls across global borders
Local and Global Gendered Violence
How do we understand violence against Malala and her
two friends Kainat and Shazia by members of the Taliban
through a global feminist framework The answer to this
question is not simple: It involves both an understanding of
the contemporary history of Malala’s community in the Swat
Valley of Pakistan, with the emerging of radical religious
views, and an understanding of international forces at work.
As Malala details in her book, her childhood and education
coincided with events that have global and local resonance.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the Swat Valley, where Malala lived,
was caught up in events closely tied to colonial histories
and contemporary struggles over the reach and influence
of U.S. and NATO power as well as the situation of the
Pashtun people. Taliban insurgents entered the Swat Valley
and were able to establish social and political influence.
The Taliban introduced public violence against people who
were perceived as not fitting into their version of Islamic
social practice. As Malala recounts, the Taliban targeted
women who danced in public, shopkeepers who sold items
considered to represent vulgarity or obscenity (e.g., TV
shows, CDs), and others who spoke or behaved in ways
that opposed the Taliban’s authority. In this fraught context,
struggle over social and political control coalesced around
gendered behavior and girls’ school attendance. Girls
were prohibited from attending school, and women were
prohibited from appearing in public without a veil.
GLOBAL FEMINISMS: SPEAKING AND ACTING ABOUT WOMEN AND GIRLS 37

The gendered violence that Malala describes is not unusual
or out of the ordinary. In many local and global contexts,
violence used to control women is a commonplace event.
For example, anthropologist Patty Kelly documents how
police target and harass women whose livelihoods have
been destroyed and who, because they lack other economic
opportunities, enter sex work to support their families and
children. This gendered violence is normalized and built into
the felt experiences of daily life. It is difficult to recognize as
violence because restrictions on women’s lives and limited
economic opportunities for women are not seen as out of
the ordinary.
Organizing against gendered violence requires
understanding local conditions in which women and girls
live, act, and speak, as well as understanding how gendered
symbols and gendered ideologies operate and how they are
tied to global practices and discourses. As Malala shows us,
challenging gendered violence builds from understanding
how and why it occurs. Just as important, challenging
gendered violence entails speaking out, organizing, creating
alliances, and changing normal, everyday behavior—as
Malala, her father, and her friends did—when faced with
efforts to control and restrict women and girl’s activities.
This twofold focus—attention to real, material conditions
of women and girl’s lives and, concurrently, acting and
speaking—is at the core of the global feminist movement.
When we approach gendered violence, we always ask, How
do women and girls, “as historically situated actors, cop[e]
with, and seek to transform the conditions of their lives”
(Kabeer 54)
Violence of Representation
As we ask questions about gendered violence, global
feminists are attentive to the ways in which gendered
violence is understood by differently situated people and
communities. Feminist scholars of language argue that
ideas about gender are formed through political discourses:
interpretations and particular ways of seeing that are tied to
powerful ways of viewing women and girls (Dingo, Scott).
For example, the violence against Malala is often discussed
in the U.S. media and other Western institutions through
pre-established ideas about Islam and gender. In this
discourse, the violence that Malala faced is seen through
an established view of Islam as inherently patriarchal and
violent toward women.
As feminists work to create political responses, we take into
account how events are perceived, particularly events that
are tied up in established beliefs about gender and religion.
In a global feminist analysis, the worldwide attention that
Malala received after she was shot by the Taliban is filtered
through common-sense ideologies held by the Western
world about Islam, Muslims, and women. Post 9/11, women
and girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan are viewed through
gendered rescue narratives, in which women and girls are
considered to be victims of religious-based patriarchy who
are in need of saving (Hesford). Rescue narratives have been
promoted and circulated by prominent political figures
such as Laura Bush, by global economic institutions such
as the World Bank, and by NGOs and other prominent
international actors. In gendered rescue narratives, Islam
is seen as patriarchal, and, therefore, violence against
women is seen as systemic to Islam. As global feminists
have pointed out, Western discourse does not adequately
acknowledge a nuanced understanding of the many
practices of Islam. Like other major religions and in other
communities, some of these religious and community
practices are patriarchal and some are not.
Building from a feminist analysis of discourses about Islam,
global feminists are concerned with how Malala’s story is
understood through pre-established ideas about women
and Islam. In a context in which Islam is perceived as
inherently patriarchal, global feminists ask what happens
when Malala’s story circulates in contexts where people read
it through preconceived notions of Muslim women. Our role
in this situation is to ask provocative questions: When global
institutions such as the U.N. invite Malala to speak, is a claim
being made that gendered violence as a whole is being
addressed Is there a danger that, by focusing on individual
women’s experience, attention is diverted from the systemic
gendered violence that exists in multiple locations, including
Western nations Does recognizing violence by extremist
and religious-based groups in Pakistan mean that violence
experienced by women in other locations is not addressed
Does drawing attention to violence experienced by one
young woman, as Malala emphasizes, divert attention from
other important political discussions, including the invasion
of Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan, or demonizing the
Muslim world
Generating Feminist Responses
The public responses to the events of Malala’s life remind
us to carefully navigate how the image of a young, brave
Muslim woman may be complicated by a wider analysis
of other forms of violence, i.e., U.S.-ordered drone strikes,
poverty, war, social and political conflicts, and violence that
takes place privately, often within families or communities.
Malala herself suggests this nuanced approach to women’s
and girls’ empowerment. As she points out in her discussion
of drones and poverty, the conflict situation that women and
girls face in Pakistan extends beyond a critique of extremist
religious Islamic use of violence against women. She
notes that imperial violence and gendered violence have
a detrimental impact on women and girls and inhibit their
capacities to live safe and fulfilling lives.
In fact, Malala’s book does the important work of creating a
complex, multifaceted analysis of and response to gendered
violence and social and material conditions in which women
and girls live. In addition to analyzing gendered violence,
Malala asks us to pay attention to the social and material
conditions in which women and girls live in Pakistan,
GLOBAL FEMINISMS: SPEAKING AND ACTING ABOUT WOMEN AND GIRLS 38

Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Malala points to the economic
constraints that factor into women’s and girls’ lack of agency.
In a short passage in the book, Malala observes a young girl
selling fruit by the side of the road. This young girl is not in
school, and therefore, the possibilities for her advancement
are limited. Malala’s analysis shows that poverty, as well as
multiple forms of violence and conflicts, limits women’s
freedom and voice. Her ambition to get an education that
would enable her to be economically independent suggests
women’s participation in formal economy can create context
for autonomy and independence. Economic opportunities,
as Malala shows, are an important aspect of women’s
empowerment.
In sum, Malala’s memoir shows us that the situation of
women and girls must be informed by a multifaceted
analysis of women in relation to local economic conditions,
political situations, ideologies of gender (not to mention
other social categories) as well as analysis of women in
relation to global economic arrangements, political alliances
and histories, and ideologies. It is within the recognition
and analysis of how these local and global forces intersect
that we, like Malala, are compelled to speak and act (Dingo).
With a robust and responsive understanding of the world
in which we live, gendered violence can be made visible,
experiences that create social exclusions can be recognized,
and the material conditions that prohibit individuals and
communities from reaching their full capacities, such as
poverty, can be addressed.
WORKS CITED
Dingo, Rebecca. Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational
Feminism, and Public Policy Writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Print.
Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist
Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990. Print.
Hesford, Wendy. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions,
Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011. Print.
Kabeer, Naila. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in
Development Thought. London: Verso, 1995. Print.
Scott, Joan. “Universalism and the History of Feminism.”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7.1 (1995) 1-14.
P A R T 2
Individual and Group Activities
1. Discuss the following points about global feminism.
Why and how do global feminists (like Malala):
• Ask questions and tell stories about gender and
gendered violence, and the material conditions in
which women and girls live
• Advocate for realization of the full human potential
of women and girls, including their political and
economic enfranchisement
• Emphasize education for women and girls as a
means to create independence and social voice
• Work for the economic participation and
empowerment of women and girls as a means of
securing independence
• Work within their own communities, and with
feminist organizations, to share information,
strategies, and ideas that translate into action
2. How might we need to understand multiple categories
that work together to construct Malala’s experiences
of gendered violence, including but not limited
to gender, race, community, nation, state, religion,
culture, tradition, ability, age, and sexuality What
other categories might we need to consider
3. What is the difference between Malala Yousafzai
the singular example and historical figure who has
spoken so eloquently and passionately about her own
experience for education and Malala who is held up as
a symbol of globalized political system that claims to
offer recognition and support to women in the Global
South Why, for feminists, is it important to distinguish
between Malala Yousafzai the person and Malala
Yousafzai the symbol Is Malala including the global
agenda or vice versa How is Malala influencing the
global agenda for the rights of girls (and boys) to an
education and the feminist movement
4. How might we expand our analysis of gendered
violence that women and girls face in local
communities to consider wider systems of violence
that Malala discusses For example, how do drone
strikes by the U.S. military destabilize political, social,
and community life, creating openings for extremist
views and groups such as the Taliban How might
poverty that is produced, in part, by global economic
structures contribute to the restrictions placed on
women’s lives
GLOBAL FEMINISMS: SPEAKING AND ACTING ABOUT WOMEN AND GIRLS 39

5. Given differences among women and girls across
global and local borders, how might these differences
be negotiated to create networks of support, alliance,
and activism Along these lines, what mutualities,
tensions, and co-responsibilities do we have with and
for each other How do the historical experiences
of girls in the United States, for example, or in other
locations, illuminate the historical experiences of girls
in Pakistan, and vice versa How are our interests
intertwined In terms of women’s and girls’ activism,
how are movements in both countries connected or
disconnected How might cross-cultural solidarities be
imagined for women and girls globally Where do we
find mutuality and common interests across borders
6. How might you work with local communities and
organizations to address violence against women and
girls in your own community As you do this work, how
might you connect with feminist organizations in other
communities to share strategies, experiences, and
information and to collaborate around issues that are
both similar and different
7. How might you conduct feminist research that could
inform feminist activism What would this research
look like Who would benefit from it
For more information about the resource guide, visit malala.gwu.edu or www.malala.org.
GLOBAL FEMINISMS: SPEAKING AND ACTING ABOUT WOMEN AND GIRLS 40

A Memoir by the Youngest Recipient
of the Nobel Peace Prize.
To learn how to purchase the
book, visit malala.gwu.edu.